Intro to Fashion Post #2

Images from “Place”, “Nation”, “Gender”, “Sexuality” are my own pictures recent years.

The image of “Race” is a backstage photo from the recent popular tv show in China, called Rap of China. https://baijiahao.baidu.com/s?id=1615400911062800670&wfr=spider&for=pc

The image of “Class”is from Uniqlo’s lookbook. https://www.uniqlo.com/jp/

 

The concept of intersectionality for me shows that he subject formation of ourselves is not made up of separate subject positions. Instead, it is made up of multiple overlapped, interplayed and intersected subject positions.

Subject positions play a huge role in my daily dress practice. Take “place” as an example, the image I chose is a photo I took with my friend in Parsons during my first year at school. My friend and I wore all black from head to toe. Susan B. Kaiser summarized about Tim Cresswell’s concept of place as “space invested with meaning in the context of power” in her book. The idea of place is also intersected with time or age. For myself, as a freshmen at that time, the reason I wore black is because most of people in Parsons wear black. I took that as a sense of coolness of a design school in New York. And I wore black for the whole semester since I want to fit in the community. When I went back to China during summer and saw lots of colorful clothes in my previous closet, I realize that the reason I wore black was not because I just love black, it is more of an imitation of the surroundings in school. And the eager of trying to imitate others shows my insecurity when I was stetted in an unfamiliar environment.

“The body is central to the study of sexuality, but so are emotions and fantasies,” Kaiser explained sexuality as a mind-body things in Fashion and Culture Studies. And when the sexuality is interacted with subject positions of gender and nation, it influence my daily dress practices or even the idea when I was shopping to a large extent. In my nation China, there is an internalized discipline of what women should not wear. Although there is no law shows that women can not wear clothes that exposure too much, women in china lots of choose not to avoid wearing clothes like sleeves tight top or tight mini skirt. Because wearing these kind of clothes in public would be considered as a dissolute women and most of the time women has to endure male gaze when wearing like this. This internalized discipline of dressing in china towards women is a phenomenon shows in the overlapped area of nation, gender, sexuality. And it influence me a lot even when I was in New York. Students in Parsons wear all kind of clothes. But when I want to wear clothes that has tight silhouette, I would choose turtleneck tight shirt with long sleeves. It is like a balance in looking sexualized without expose too much part of body.

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