Fashion provides one of the most ready means - Essay Example

Fashion provides one of the most ready means through which individuals can make expressive visual ments about their identities.” (Bennet, 2005)Most observers of human culture would agree that the way people dress is in some way indicative of the type of person they are. On a practical, everyday level, people make judgements about each other based on the visual impression that they make, and a large part of this impression derives from the type of clothing, accessories, hairstyle, make-up, body-art and other distinguishing features that a person chooses. Exactly how and why this happens, however, and what part fashion plays in defining or expressing people’s identities are questions which raise a number of complex issues. This paper explores what fashion is, from several perspectives, and highlights a number of difficulties in equating fashion with the expression of individual identity. The term “fashion” derives from the French verb faire which means simply “to make,” and it came to be used at first by the upper classes of Europe who began to mingle more freely with each other and exchange influences during the Industrial revolution. This connection with class, and with expanding European capitalism, continues into modern discourses about globalization and the dominance of Eurocentric ideas in the modern world. There is something about travel that encourages waves of imitation to cross from one culture to the next. It became obvious that different countries “fashioned” their everyday objects differently, and so the adoption of a “fashion” which imitated that of a distant place became an indicator of wealth and sophistication. An English aristocratic woman’s purpose in buying the latest pattern for dressmaking or interior design in Paris was therefore a celebration of difference, setting the owner apart from others of her own circle, and creating an insurmountable social gap between those who could afford such luxuries, and those servants and workers who could perhaps glimpse such wonders but never hope to ever own them.1 Already, then, it is obvious that the adoption of new fashions, from whatever source, is a complex undertaking that involves economic and social factors as well as elements of personal choice and self-expression. In many contexts, clothing indicates what a person does more than who a person is. An example of this is that of uniforms, since a uniform can indicate that the person wearing it is carrying out a professional role. It can be a means of social control, for example to create group identity in a prison or in a school, where members of a hierarchically ordered community are required to wear certain approved types of clothing. In these cases individuality is suppressed, and social conformity is the required outcome. These are highly regulated examples, but there are countless other situations which reflect invisible social rules which people adopt in order to function in hierarchically structured institutions. The jeans that so many students wear to college can be interpreted therefore as a kind of uniform, which displays not their own individuality, and freedom from the authority of parents and schoolteachers, but their conformity to another set of rules, this time unwritten, about what it means to be a student. Very few people would want to define themselves solely in terms of their educational or work role, however. Many people deliberately subvert dress codes in subtle ways, as a sort of resistance to the prevailing norms, with which they disagree, or from which they feel excluded. This is quite different from the exclusion of the working classes from aristocratic fashion, because it is undertaken as a distancing step, creating a spectrum of diverse positions which people can freely choose. The baggy pants and hoodies of rap culture are fashion statements because of what they symbolise in general terms, namely the perception of danger and criminality that they convey. There is a sort of group identity projected here, but it is not very firmly rooted in actual experience. Most wearers of this fashion are law-abiding and middle class imitators, rather than genuine gangsters. This is parody rather than genuine imitation, and it reflects a nuanced and quite ambiguous view of fashion. People who follow such trends seem to be reaching for an identity that they would like to have, rather than reflecting who they really are. This kind of imitative behaviour presupposes, of course, that people have the means available to exercise choice and flexibility, in terms of alternatives available to them, and the money to devote to matters of style. In modern times people do have the luxury to experiment with different fashions. Most people vary their styles in their free time, as for example dressing up for a wedding, or dressing down for a barbecue, and choosing all kinds of smart, casual, or outrageous clothes and accessories to project a certain image and mood for specific purposes. These habits show that fashion is used to indicate temporary roles, moods and states that people successively adopt, according to many unwritten rules of behaviour. This can extend to the expression of gender and sexual orientation, as people “perform” aspects of their identity, but as Edwards notes, this use of fashion “remains strictly limited within specific and primarily consumption-driven economic, demographic and geographical parameters”.2 It would be a mistake to project this Western view of fashion across all human cultures, since many non-industrialized countries retain a much more and regimented view of fashion which changes very slowly over time and does not allow this amount of variation. There have been some periods in which fashion has been used to make political statements, such as the strident bra-burning of the feminist movement or above-the-knee hemlines of “Swinging London” of the 1960s which reflected a loosening of sexual taboos since the invention of the contraceptive pill, and a new focus on youth culture in the baby boomer generation after the end of the Second World War. When hippie communities reach for cheesecloth and ethnic patterns or punk bands adorn their clothes with safety pins and chains, there are obvious messages in their choice of fashion which are eagerly decoded and imitated by those who agree with the particular world view in which messages first arose. Some kinds of fashion nowadays are created and popularised in the working class and paraded at street level, only to adopted by music and film producers so that they “bubble up” from subculture to mainstream culture rather than following a “trickle down” from upper class fashion.3 Teenage or youth culture has been theorised in particular ways: “Youth is not so much a biological category overlaid with social consequences as a complex of shifting cultural classifications marked by difference and diversity… of particular significance are discourses of style, image, difference and identity” 4 The meaning of youth itself is then ambiguous, with many different connotations ranging from criminality to a sense of entitlement and even privilege, and multiple sub-cultures which promote some values and resist others as they intersect with other social categorizations such as ethnicity, class and gender. When we observe young people indulging in particular fashions, it is clear that they are expressing something, but the question is, whether this is their own identity, or something different. There have been many excellent accounts of historical changes in fashion, explaining how in the past these have reflected large scale changes in the way society has developed though many dimensions, whether it be in terms of race, gender, age, class, culture or any number of other social categories.5 Most people think of fashion predominantly in terms of women’s clothes and style, due to the media obsession with glamour and beauty. With the growing acceptance in many areas of life of homosexuality, this has extended to gay style, and now also to masculinity in general. Fashion has always been used to display degrees of modesty and erotic potential.6 What is different in post-modern culture, is the way that fashions highlight ambiguous and contradictory currents. The coherence of earlier periods is being fragmented, in many areas of life, so that clear correspondences between expression and meaning are being lost. Everything references other things, through quotation and imitations, so that meanings are always mixed, and communication becomes ambiguous. Craik’s work on masculinity points out the tension between the absolute and buttoned-up conformity of male suits, with their implicit rejection of any frivolous adornment or display of the body on the one hand, and the simultaneous adulation of the sporting male body on the other hand, with its culture of “exhibitionism, physical contact between men, and the display of physical attributes”.7 The increasing speed of cultural change is very obvious in modern Western fashion, and this is related to some extent to political changes that occurred in the twentieth century. Fashion, however, is no longer such a clear reflector of these changes, since it has become so commercialized that it reflects little more than the requirements of the market place for novelty and profitability. People play with different identities all the time, and a fashion statement in the year 2012 is just as likely to conceal a person’s identity as to reveal it. The overriding impression of celebrity fashion in the modern media is one of excess and above all extreme changeability. Pop icons of the seventies and eighties had their trade mark fashions which were slavishly followed by fans, as for example in the tartan scarves of the Bay City Rollers and the dreadlocks and colourful make up of Culture Club. In the new millennium starts reinvent themselves with every album, or in some cases like the singer Pink, with every stage performance. This post-modern fragmentation revels in change, and threatens even the concept of fashion as it used to be understood. In capitalist societies, an incentive for businesses to grasp any cultural trends and commercialize any marketable assets. Modern media facilitate a commodification of fashion which turns the fashion statements of celebrities into high street products. This is not fashion as a statement of identity, but fashion as a marketing of mass culture. The motivation behind it is money and the circulation of goods and services to create profits for manufacturers, most of whom are owned and exploited by the cultural elites. When viewed from this perspective, fashion is then an expression of trends which originate in the world of business. Its effects are not universal, but particular, because of the differential effects of economic power: “The significance of men’s fashion is more demographically specific and often focused strongly on younger men, more affluent men, and most importantly, those living and working in a metropolitan environment.”8 Some academics have now ruled out the potential of fashion to express any coherent, class dependent affiliation: “Social class is no longer clearly defined in terms of fashion, in part because of the excess associated with the nouveaux-riches styles of the 1980s” 9 As we have seen above, the same is true of gender, which is increasingly being caught up in the contradictions of a society that is run on patriarchal principles but aspires to a more diversified model, at least in some quarters. What this analysis makes clear is that human identity is complex, and cannot be encapsulated in any one visual means such as fashion. The most that we can expect of fashion is that it can be symbolic of many conflicting currents within a person and within society at large. It conveys not one but many meanings, only some of which related to identity, and even this subset of meanings is likely to fragmented and contradictory. For this reason, it cannot be said that fashion is a ready means to through which individuals can make expressive visual statements about their identities. It is too much in service to commercial ends, and too transitory to hold any clear view of who a person is and what they stand for. Bibliography Barker, C., Youth, Style and Resistance, in Cultural Studies: Theory and Practice, London: Sage, 2003, pp. 374-402. Barnard, M., Fashion Theory: A Reader, London: Routledge, 2007. Bennet, A.. Culture and Everyday Life. London: Sage, 2005. Church-Gibson, P., ‘Analysing fashion’ in T. Jackson and D. Shaw (Eds.) The Fashion Handbook, London: Routledge, 2006, pp. 20-28. Craik, J., ‘Fashioning Masculinity’ in The Face of Fashion: Cultural Studies in Fashion, London: Routledge, pp. 170-198. Craik, J., Fashion: The Key Concepts, Oxford: Bang, 2009. De la Haye, A. and Wilson, E., (Eds.), Defining Dress: Dress as Object, Meaning and Identity, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999. Edwards, T., Cultures of Masculinity, London: Routledge, 2006. Entwistle, J., The Fashioned Body: Fashion, Dress and Modern Social Theory, Cambridge: Polity, 2000. Hall, S. ‘The Question of Cultural Identity’, in Hall, S., Held, D. and McGrew, T., (Eds.), Modernity and Its Futures, Cambridge: Polity, 1992, pp. 273-326. Halttunen, K. ‘Sentimental Culture and the Problem of Fashion’, in L. Welters and A. Lillethun, (Eds.), The Fashion Reader, Second Edition, Oxford: Berg, 2011, pp. 197-201. Macdonald, M., Representing Women, London: E. Arnold, 1995. Steele, V., ‘Fashion Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow’, in N. White and I. Griffiths, (Eds.), The Fashion Business: theory, practice, image, Oxford: Berg, 2000, pp. 1-20. Read More