“Fashion has a tendency to construct its own canons. Like every cultural form these should be documented and then subjected to debate and challenge. Art historians are expert creators and destroyers of these canons, as surely as modernism follows romanticism. Like art historians, fashion scholars need to look and question.”
When Breward talks about fashion creating its own canons, I think that he is talking about how fashion can create its own revolutions in the industry or the society that it serves. Breward says that “art historians are expert creators and destroyers of these canons”, which means that art historians are the ones that decide if every vent should be called a revolution or not. Then he gives an example of how modernism follows romanticism and this shows how canons has created a revolution to change one era from the one to the next. He says that fashion scholars need to look and question the revolutions or change to accurately document when fashion has changed from one period to the next. Fashion can create its own revolutions like when women stopped depending or using corsets and began to wear looser clothing, this was a revolution of feminism of freedom for women.
I agree with the aphorism because fashion creates its own time periods, rather than a certain person or industry. I feel that fashion has the power to change its own course by revolutions of its own making by slow action.
“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.”
For some people that are confident about their style and how they want to express themselves, fashion can serve as a tool to confidently show to they are and how they think. On the other hand, it can be about “anxiety, ambiguity and worry” for those that are not confident about who they want to portray or represent. These people would always have difficulty expressing themselves because they either worry about how they look like to other people or how they want to express themselves. Fashion can be interpreted many different ways and it is not always positive. The way that people express themselves through fashion is very complex because fashion is such a physical, appearance based expression that is so obvious and vulnerable.
I also agree with this aphorism because I also used to have anxiety about the way I looked and dressed. I feel like the way we try to express ourselves is so difficult because people usually decide how they are going to treat us by the way we look, so we need to pay more attention to our physical looks. The pressure of this creates anxiety and worry for a lot of people.
