Seeing “fashion” as a topic of a course, especially when it is called “fashion studies”, it becomes a very serious topic, something seems distant and sober. In addition, all those readings with the difficult (for me) terminologies push fashion farther from me, myself. At the beginning, I saw fashion more as an emotionless topic that used in the course. However, as the semester processes, fashion starts to be close to me. Although some of the readings are still difficult to understand, the examples that are used and the way the professor explained to us makes more sense. And I started to notice that no matter how unfamiliar the vocabularies are, the ultimate intension of most of the readings is to explain the close connection between fashion and our lives. Fashion is an applied art. As Susan Kaiser wrote in Fashion and Cultural Studies, “Fashion matters in everyday life; it becomes embodied.”[i]It reflects as small things as our everyday activities to as great as a period time of history. I myself don’t have the mood spending time thinking about what to wear everyday, so I thought my fashion doesn’t reflect my up to date aesthetics in my mind. Nonetheless, it reflects my attitude to my own fashion. The less effort I pay on my own fashion is also a fashion statement. Fashion is not a separate topic than can be discussed without our daily lives. By doing the Dress Practice Log, I clearly see the how relevant Fashion is to our daily life. The most memorable quote in Sophie Woodward’s Hanging Out in the Home and the Bedroom is her reflection after she analyzed all the wardrobes, “Women are not just ordering shirts, but are also regulating their lives.”[ii]It may sounds very exaggerated, but it is very empathic.
Notes:
[i]Kaiser, Fashion and Cultural Studies (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2011), 7.
[ii]Sophie Woodward, Why Women Wear What They Wear (Oxford: Berg, 2007), 43.
