At the beginning of the term, I put down fashion as a recorder or a witness for history. It is a type of visual art that is so intricately linked to human’s everyday life in a way that fashion history can be somehow viewed as another version of human history. However, now, I realized that other than the role that fashion stands in the bigger world, there is also a very personal and intimate aspect of fashion. I thus call fashion the intersection between personal story and history – it is indeed both. In Susan Kaiser’s Fashion and Cultural Studies, she introduced a term “minding appearance”, which refers to a process “that individuals bridge mind and body issues, and style themselves in ways that articulate their most recent thoughts about who they are (becoming)…the system of style-fashion-dress offers a way to bridge across subject positions, manage power relations, and sort through visual and material cultures to see what just might be the best possible articulation of self at the moment.”[1] To summarize the theory, it means people dress their body according to their self-images in their minds – the fashion they wear tell their story at the moment and is making a certain statement. For example, I started to dress in more formal attire this year for school since I want to make myself look more professional and less childish. So I rarely wear streetwear – hoodies and sweatpants – which were my common outfits last year. This help me to determine the goal of my fashion design career – everything I design must tell a story, whether it is or is inspired by what I care or experienced in life. Every clothes I design should have a meaning behind it, so when I look back, I know why I make those design choices instead of blindly following what is the mainstream tr
[1] Susan B. Kaiser, Fashion and Cultural Studies (New York/London: Bloomsbury, 2019), 412-413
Bibliography:
Kaiser, Susan B. Fashion and Cultural Studies. New York/London: Bloomsbury, 2019.
