Defining Fashion
To most, fashion is the image of a tall, skinny, young woman wearing expensive clothing. The overwhelming common idea of fashion is that it is gendered, classed, and frivolous. For a while, I had thought of fashion in a similar manner; to me it was clothes and a means of self expression, but I had never really considered it in a greater context that extends beyond design aesthetics, expression, and function. As Susan Kaiser writes in Fasion and Cultural Studies, “Fashion is more than a white, bourgeois (upper middle class), heterosexual female affair” (Kaiser 34, 2012). From the very beginning of Kaiser’s text, she states that fashion is, “working through ideas, negotiating subject positions (e.g., gender, ethnicity, class), and navigating through power relations. It involves mixing, borrowing, belonging, and changing. But it is also about matching, creating, differentiating, and continuing. It is a complex process that entangles multiple perspectives and approaches” (Kaiser 2012, 1). It is about creating, changing, manipulating, exaggerating, expressing, being human; it is about appearing and interacting with the world as who we are and who we want to be. As people in a highly visual, highly connected world, fashion is a means to facilitate the relationship between the individual and the society, the body and the environment. Fashion can be clothing, but it can also not be clothing. Taking this newfound definition into my own current and future design practice, I feel liberated to create for the complete human experience. There is no limitation to what fashion can and should look like, regardless of the prevalent stereotype perpetuated by popular media. There is no limitation because, fashion, put simply, is existing.
