Choose any two of Christopher Breward’s aphorisms from his foreword to Fashion Studies, which you read in Week 1. Explain what each of the two aphorisms means (in your own words) and explain why you agree or disagree with them.

 

1: “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 re-lived and futures foretold.”

I agree with this aphorisms by Christopher Breward, in my opinion, fashion is totally personal. It’s different compare to the phrase “aesthetic appreciation”. Aesthetic taste can be influenced by the public trend or other designers brand which is legal to do. An aesthetic taste of a designer is an accumulation of all of their past personal experiences. Fashion is the ultimate result of combining with designers personal memories, mood and experiences and output a new personal aesthetics after absorbing aesthetic knowledges. Therefore, the equation of Fashion is equal to past aesthetics plus personal experiences and memories. Not a single one can be omitted. Otherwise, fashion will be either a duplication of other brand or a closed independent brand. As a designer, collections are the representatives of themselves. The public are able to get to know the designer by looking at his/her collections, probably a memories from a moment in the past or the idea he/she wants to do in the future.

 

2: “Fashion is so all-encompassing and encyclopedic in its terrain that it seems tailor-made for the era of big data. The old antiquarians used it to map national customs and habits. We have the tools to put it to the service of as yet unimagined projects, of even greater scope and impact.”

I also agree with this aphorisms, especially this sentence “it seems tailor-made for the era of big data”. The keyword is “big data era”, in nowadays, the big data era is more conductive to the development of fashion marketing. Big data is encyclopedia, it tells everything. “The ancestors used it to map national customs and habits, but we have the tools to put it to the service of as yet unimagined projects, of even greater scope and impact.” For nowadays society, fashion is still a word about physical clothes, but who knows what the definition of fashion will change to in many years later.