In the beginning of the semester of Intro to Fashion Studies, I already viewed fashion as expanding far beyond what you see walk down the runway, connecting various parts of society, culture, and time all over the world. However, I did not know so much the specifics or the history behind how fashion became what it is, or rather I never took the time to consider it. For example, obviously designers are a large part of the fashion machine, but I hadn’t thought about the designer as a brand versus a person and their representation in popular media. Creative directors have become celebrities and idols, in and out of the fashion community with names ranging from Karl Lagerfeld and Donatella Versace to Virgil Abloh and Alexander Wang. There are many people that see the face and the singular person before they see the fashion, but the two are not necessarily interchangeable. As Yuniya Kawamura writes in Fashion-ology, “The making of designers is not a responsibility of one individual but of a collective activity,” and yet the media puts pressure on whoever is at the helm of a brand or house to not only create innovative and eye-catching fashion, but to be a spectacle in and of themselves for people to watch and leer over (60). Many people, including myself, make judgments on the fashion and the industry in response to the actions of those singular individuals, despite the fact that the integrity of a fashion house can remain no matter who is leading it. My understanding of what fashion is has grown especially in relation to that.
