What is fashion?
In the beginning of the semester, we were been asked this question, what is fashion? Through a whole semester’s study, for me the idea of fashion is expanding, and fashion has related to many things. We talked about fashion, style and dress, and the difference between each one is so little but significant. From the shallow aspect, fashion is clothing and it should have its functionality. Through the dress practice log assignment, I realized how you decided to dress yourself through clothing is actually a big concerned which I had not noticed before, it need to have strong connection with your schedules, location, environment, even the mood and other people. Fashion is defined by style, and style is such a personal thing that could be influenced by many reasons, various from your personal background, your cultural aesthetic, your age, your favorite color, your social status, etc.
After watch the film “Dior and I”, my interpretation of fashion has even gone deeper: fashion could be a 3D wearable form of art. Except of its functional purpose as a clothes, for high-end level of design, fashion needs defiantly go beyond clothing, what Raf Simons is exploring is also an visual experiment to art. Before, I would agree that fashion is about trendy, what is fashioning right now is the key tense to fashion, but learning from two of our guest speakers in the lecture class, fashion can be unique style, instead of following the new trend one can defiantly fashion through old and vintage items. Fashion is about one’s individual clothing style, but fashion could also associated to a group of people and even uniformity. Fashion is image, but is also a nonverbal language; fashion can be described as one’s lifestyle, then it goes beyond clothing, a fashionable lifestyle with aesthetics is something that many people is aiming for. Fashion is a word and also a world, it is something that makes people feel exciting but also makes people afraid about. Fashion is something that changes various from culture to culture, you can find the similarity but yet they are so different.
The idea about fashion and aging is fascinating. People do afraid of being aged, even though is it human natural to be old. Before, in my mind fashion is really more of a youth oriented cultural field. As Julia Twigg writes in her article “Fashion, the Body, and Age”, when she brought in the idea about aging in fashion, she also states “In relation to high fashion, aging sets in early, certainly by the late twenties.”[1] And she also marked “Fashion is strongly, perhaps inherently youth oriented. It is beautiful, young bodies that designers aspire to dress and that are featured throughout the fashion system.”[2] In this industry, what we have all assumed the ideal type of women that most designers are targeting for would be a young woman who has a perfect body, silhouette, and performance. However, the boundary seems shifted, getting older doesn’t means you have to follow the strict dressing rules and covering your arms. Therefore, record from this whole semester’s study, the idea has totally changed: When we had Debra Rapoport came to speak at class, and she defiantly explored the role of clothing and dress in the changing cultural identities of older women. She absolute had show to me that there is something sophisticated and elegant that could be brought out with the fashion and age.
Footnotes:
[1] Julia Twigg, Fashion, the Body, and Age, <The Hand Book of Fashion Studies>,(London: Bloomsbury,2013), 79.
[2] Julia Twigg, Fashion, the Body, and Age, <The Hand Book of Fashion Studies>,(London: Bloomsbury,2013), 81.