Intro to Fashion learning portfolio post 3 – the Dress Practice Interview

I find subjects of gender, age, and the environment in Jessica’s closet. As her close friend and classmates, I almost see her every day, but I didn’t notice before that the color palette of her clothes is so bright and colorful. I think this reflects her awareness of she being a young female in her daily dress practice because, from my observation, these colors are generally what the society called “girly” colors. She even said herself:” I like bright girly colors because I want to dress like a young vivacious girl.” Also, I knew she is a very organized person, which reflects on her daily habits, but I didn’t think she would even be so organized about her clothing until I saw her closet. What’s similar about her closet and mine is that we both hang our clothes, and we both organize our clothes according to thickness. But the difference is that I have my active clothes in my “chairdrobe” and “floordrobe”, but she hangs clothes that she would frequently use like the bath towel at the door of the closet. According to Sophie Woodward, “Where fashion is experienced by the individual as a source of anxiety. This anxiety is a product not only 0f fashion, but also of the multiple overlapping roles women are called upon to assume.” (Woodward, Sophie. Why Women Wear What They Wear. Oxford: Berg, 2007.) Jessica and I subject positions have a large percent of overlapping, like gender, age, ethnicity, and sexuality. But in contrast to Jessica’s closet, my clothes are largely in black. Although we both acknowledge our gender as female, I don’t tightly relate my daily dress practice to that. I think more about how I want to present to the outside world and fashion as a tool to reinforce it. However, Jessica thinks her subject positions of being a girl needs to be fully reflected in her daily dress practice as for how she wants to be placed in the society. So having the role of gender placed in Jessica, she gets more anxious when she feels like she is not dressing like a girl than I do. In this closet interview, I find out fashion is a very subjective way of self-expression, while our bodies changes and our interpretation of our bodies changes daily, the clothes we choose changes. All the changes in subject position will reflect on fashion. That’s why people say “clothes are human’s second skin”.

 

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