At the beginning of the semester, I was asked, in my Introduction to Fashion Studies Lecture, to define fashion. It took me a while to think of the answer I would write because I had never thought of it and I hadn’t heard anybody fully answer it either. I was asked the following question:
Imagine that all physical and digital data that exists is somehow lost, and you have been asked to write an encyclopedia entry for the word “fashion.” Your definition is the only one people will see when they look up this word, now and forever. How will you explain this concept and everything it encompasses?
After a semester reading texts from Susan Kaiser to Georg Simmel, I know have a clearer idea of what Fashion is. Fashion is change, constant change. Fashion is clothes, everything we wear, things with which we adorn our body: paint, tattoos, piercings, scarification, makeup, and many more forms of self-expression. Fashion harms the environment but also makes awareness of the climate crisis. Fashion bends its shape around its current environment and the people it defines. Fashion can be a form of non-verbal communication. Fashion as Joanne Entwisle said: “Our experience of embodiment is thus always meditated by the culture we live in,” meaning that your own experience of how you dress our body will be dictated by the culture we are situated in. 1
Before this class, I didn’t question my dress-practice or anybody else’s. I realize now that everybody has their own ‘why’s’ behind their clothes, why they bought them, why they wear them on a specific day, why they don’t wear certain clothes, etc. Susan Kaiser, in Fashion and Cultural Studies, explains that: “Part of dressing or fashioning the body is a kind of ritual experience or personal conditioning that occurs in everyday life,” explaining that the act of getting ready and choosing your clothes is something that everybody does, everyone in their own personal ways and based on their subject positions. Kaiser also mentions in “Intersectional, Transnational Fashion Subjects”, that people’s dress-practice is defined because of their subject positions: nationality, location, age, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, class, and the like. Since this reading, I’ve been aware that in the following years while studying Fashion Design and after I graduate, I have to keep in mind who I’m designing for and where I am designing in. Whoever my costumer might be or the country in which I am based, I have to include the countries ‘rules’ of dress, because I don’t want to disrespect the culture and the people. I want people to feel comfortable in my clothes, and for them to feel understood. For example if I am designing clothes for women in Saudi Arabia, I will not make clothes that are revealing because it is not used in there, as opposed to other countries. 2
In conclusion, fashion is within us. Whether we see it or not. Through fashion, we can express feelings or emotions not possible with language. With fashion, we can get to know someone. We can understand the social rules of different countries, and how they have changed throughout time and how they might change in the future.
Fashion is … us.
[1] Entwistle, Joanne. “The Dressed Body.” In Real Bodies: A Sociological Introduction, edited by Mary Evans and Ellie Lee, p.138. Hampshire and New York: PALGRAVE, 2002.
[2] Kaiser, Susan B. 2012. “Intersectional, Transnational Fashion Subjects”. In Fashion and Cultural Studies. New York, London: Berg, 2012.
