Fashion is the expression of cultural interaction between people in time and space, which can vary due to its geographical locations, its needs, its class, its gender, status, values and cultural beliefs across the world.
Today, I feel though the word fashion has become dated and we need to find a new word for it, because the pure fashion, fashion which expresses, invents, pokes fun and tells a story has become swallowed by fast fashion. Time plays an important role in that because we consume too much and value too little. Oscar Wilde once said, nowadays people know the price of everything but the value of nothing, which I think is so true when it comes down to consuming fast fashion and trends/hype. That reminds me of a brand that I experienced, who shied to make a political/ cultural expression and just designed for beauty and copy trends from elite design brands/bloggers. But what is the purpose of copying trends? Where are the values, the memories, and the love go for art in fashion? That’s why I think the word fashion means a form and way of dress practice which connected to routine thinking but not so much about art in fashion and its significance in the world. The way we do fashion, think fashion and dress fashion in school today is far more unique than in what we see in the market. My designs express an emotion, a memory, a story or a lifestyle which takes inspiration from everything (food, nature, peoples interaction, traveling, cultural and political experience) where I get to experiment a lot, fail and succeed but that’s what I think is needed to produce a voice, a dialogue, a dress practice that’s worth to be shown/exist in the world. Fashion for me is far more than a dress practice, it’s the connections between time and space, cultural and political values/ beliefs and sustainable thinking, which encounters being open-minded to dress more than one gender or class type, but on a limited production scale (no mass production nor copying trends). One of my favorite quotes from Susan Kaiser is that “gender and subject positions in life are always under construction due to social, cultural and personal interest and the questions we ask to find out more about ourselves (Kaiser, 2013, pp 123), which I believe is also so true for fashion the lifestyle, the dress practice and the identity we try to express, which proves that we reworking our ideas but we should also deconstructed them, even more, to help create more quality again than quantity.
