“Fashion can be about confirmation, of self and others. But it is also about anxiety, ambiguity and worry. As an aid to understanding psychological complexities, it is unsurpassed.”
“Fashion is intensely personal, in the same way that poetry is intensely personal. It is a medium through which personal stories can be told, memories relived and futures foretold.”
I selected the first aphorism because I found truth in it. I may not agree completely with the rest of the aphorisms in the essay such as “Fashion is made manifest in material forms. It demands study in the same way that ancient artifacts are made meaningful by archaeologists: through careful excavation.” This one I do not agree with because I do not feel that the study of fashion is what makes it “meaningful.” In my opinion, it is the designer, the story behind it, and the journey of fashion that lends meaning to it as opposed to solely the study of it. I have found through my own endeavors in fashion design that it is a form of understanding and expression of emotion to the world. I have used designs in the past to work through personal trauma with the process having a therapeutic effect and the final result communicating said trauma as well as my own state of mind to the world around me. “As an aid to understanding psychological complexities, it is unsurpassed;” this really hit home to me. I have studied one designer in particular extensively and wrote a final essay in my seminar class about how his state of mind and his experiences in life drastically influenced his collections; this designer would be Alexander McQueen.
I felt that the second aphorism I picked went loosely hand-in-hand with the first. I believe there is definite truth in the statement “fashion is intensely personal” because it is true in my own experience once again. I find that my own sense of fashion stems from my personal experiences not just psychologically as above but through my childhood, my environment, my adolescence, my beliefs, interests and so on. I find that no one person’s sense of fashion is perfectly the same and I believe that it is this differentiation and diversity that makes fashion such an undefinable thing; it means something so different to each individual. A person who claims to have incredible fashion sense but has never been educated in the craft will have a completely different opinion on “fashion” than someone who has studied it extensively as everyone in the BFA Fashion Design program does.
