At the beginning of this semester, I thought of fashion as an object having a paradoxical concept. On the one hand, people use fashion because they need it but, at the same time, people want fashion in order to also satisfy their aesthetic desires. My concept of fashion at the beginning of the semester revolved around the thinking that fashion was comprised of merely the combination of the utilitarian feature and the feature of wanting clothing even though it is not needed. However, when I was asked to compare and contrast between fashion, dress, and style, I had to rethink my thoughts and the question made me think about what the principle of fashion was. The juxtaposition of these three elements was helpful in my reconsideration of fashion because if the functionality is moved from fashion into the dress category, then what remains in the fashion category? The aesthetic desire? Probably not. Fashion cannot be simplified like that. As I thought more deeply about this question I gradually began to find what I believed was the answer to what is fashion. According to the book Fashion and Cultural Studies, “…they rely on feedback from others–style-fashion-dress is a social process. Subjects interact with other subjects. Individual processes of subjectivity become collective processes of inter subjectivity when individuals engage, influence, and perceive one another.” The needs or wants of fashion could be a starting point to define fashion; however, fashion goes beyond merely satisfying one’s needs or wants. Fashion is intersectionality of people and reflections of society. Joanne Entwistle observes in her book The Dressed Body that “The dressed body is not only a uniquely individual, private and sensual body, it is a social phenomenon too since our understandings and techniques of dress and our relationship to cloth are socially and historically constituted”. Those readings gave me an opportunity to think more deeply about the complicated relationship between fashion, people, society, and history, and I believe my thinking has changed from having simple and vague thoughts on fashion to deeper and intersectional ideas of fashion.
