This class has truly allowed me to take a much deeper and disillusioned look at not only fashion and its definition, but the fashion world in general, as well. I have to be honest, prior to this class I never looked at certain brands or came to the conclusions we came to as a class, especially in recitation. Looking back now, I had a very superficial and quite frankly, surface-level view and outlook on fashion. I learned so much throughout the semester and a lot of the lessons learned have truly allowed me to be a lot more conscious about certain brands (Vetements, for example and just “big” brands in general such as Hermès etc…) and clothes in general. In addition, this class has really opened my eyes to how I would want to run my own brand in the future – it has truly gotten the ball rolling for thinking about what I would eventually want the morals of my future brand to be, the message, the intent etc. Every week, I remember thinking how crazy that I never actually took an in-depth look at, or even slightly attempted to unpack the different themes covered such as “Fashion with Age” or “Fashion and Display.”
I remember the first or second class of the semester when we had to define fashion, style and dress and I honestly didn’t have much of an idea of what to write. A semester later, thanks to both class and Susan Kaiser, I now know the difference between the three and am able to define fashion more confidently. I now define fashion as a continually repeating cycle which adapts to our current time. Fashion is a study in a broad range of themes such as ethnicity, age, gender, our current economy and societal events amongst other concepts. Fashion is so cyclical and adaptive in nature that I don’t believe it can have any other definition, as we learned!
