Creative Tech Project – Dress

November, 2017

 

When I came into this semester my understanding of fashion was limited to its material meaning. When I thought of this word fashion I would instantly think about clothes and accessories. However, this course made me understand how fashion is so multifaceted and goes beyond just the superficial materials. Fashion to me now is a capacious network involving an individual and his/her body, lifestyle, time, society, subculture, habitus, subject positions/intersectionality and so much more. Fashion is a concept so aligned with an individual’s identity, it is something we carry with everywhere we go. Fashion for me is now not inanimate anymore, I see how there’s so much life in it as I am now exposed to Fashions relationship with an individual and his/her body. This proximity of our fashion – the style, fashion, dress of an individual, to his or her complex identity, subject positions, is something we came across in Susan Kaisers Intersectional Transnational Fashion Subjects, Fashion and Cultural Studies text –

 

            ‘Assumption Number 3: Subject Formation through Style, Fashion, Dress is a Personal Process of Navigating Intersectionalities

…The simultaneity is of subject positions is probably nowhere more evident than through style, fashion, dressed bodies.’[1]  

 

One of the most fitted examples from this text would be that of Priyanka Chopra and how she conveys her intersectionalties through what she wears – although her approach is very western she also wears fashion created by Indian designers from her home country[2].  This understanding of an individual/the body’s relationship to the style, fashion, dress it carries has not only helped me in theory but also practically because now every time I design a project I always consider my model, her identity, what she represents or stands for, and how my garment is going to interact with her body.

 

 

 

[1] 1    Susan B. Kaiser, Fashion and Cultural Studies (London; New York: Bloomsbury Publishing Inc., 2015), 35.

[2] 1 Kaiser, Fashion and Cultural, 28-29.