What is Fashion? Christopher Breward once said in the foreword in the book – Fashion Studies: Research Methods, Sites and Practices, that “Fashion does not define. It is instead a term that demands definition.”[1] This statement resonated with me a lot throughout the course of the semester. At the beginning of the semester, I wrote that Fashion is a platform that has the power and ability to mask or represent someone’s identity. Throughout the semester, my definition of Fashion got further refined as we explored terms like “agency” and “habitus”. Fashion became a visual representation of a deeper social construct beyond the surface level of aesthetics. It is a vessel in which gender, culture, heritage, craft, businesses, and history nest their bodies in. Sometimes, our perspective of our own fashion choices is so deeply ingrained in us from birth, that we do not realize the heavily loaded agency these clothing contain. It is a second skin of the human body. Our fashion allows us to re-evaluate ourselves, it makes us aware of our bodies. Joanne Entwistle once said in her book, “The Dressed Body”, that “to understand the relationship between the dress and the body, one must acknowledge the very private and very visceral nature of dress which imposes itself on our experience of the body, expressing or constraining it, making us aware of the girth of our waist, (…) or the breadth of our shoulder blades, the length of our arms or legs, and so on….”[2] Fashion is now a representation of our form, beyond the naked body, and it is constantly evolving and changing with culture and context.
[1]Breward, Christopher. Fashion Studies: Research Methods, Sites and Practices. Bloomsbury Academic. pp xviii
[2] Entwistle, Joanne, “The Dressed Body”, In Real Bodies: A Sociological Introduction, New York: Palgrave, 2002, pp.134
