THEORY READING - WHY STUDY FASHION?

INTRODUCTION - WHY STUDY FASHION?

Key approaches to studying fashion

Although many students of fashion want to learn about it simply because they like dressing up or shopping for clothes, this doesn’t happen in a vacuum. We need to understand why fashion fascinates us and acquire tools that help us make sense of fashion as a cultural phenomenon. This means that we have to understand how different writers have analysed fashion from particular perspectives, that is, developed theories of fashion. You may not be interested in theory, but if you ignore it, your understanding of fashion will be limited and one dimensional because it will lack a critical perspective, which will make your attitude toward fashion shallow. This is not to say that what you like and don’t like is not valid, but it does mean that these are just opinions that do not take account of the myriad of factors that shape why fashion is how it is and why you like certain fashions and not others. These factors include the history of clothes, the structure and economics of the industry, artistic influences on taste, the social organisation of a culture … and factors that shape cultural continuity and change. fashion theorists try to develop a model that takes account of these various factors. (Craik, 2009, pp.5-7).

Dress History : The What and the When 

These analysts interpreted dress as the genre of objects that reflected aspects of design, construction, fabric and aesthetics. This systematic collection and analysis of apparel created historical records of changing modes of dress in the past, thus contributing to the classification of different kinds of clothing and successive dress styles. (Craik, 2009, p.10).

What About the How and Why  ...


Anthropologists, Ethnologists, and Social Scientists 

These theorists were interested in developing so-called grand theories of society and culture as a whole and used the example of dress and fashion as an instance of their general principles.

In particular, such theorists wanted to explain why humans were distinctive and how they differed from animals. Factors like language, collective modes of living, forms of social exchange, and the use of symbolic systems were part of the answer. Among the most important symbolic forms were modes of dress - that is, the fact that humans have always adorned the body with skins, fabrics, ornaments, pigments, and so on. Clothing, therefore was seen as a key clue to understanding humanity ...

Social Psychologists and Sociologists 

Questions about how clothes denote social status (hierarchies, class position and differentiation, age, gender and ethnicity) were central to such approaches. (Craik, 2009, pp.9-12).

REFERENCE

Craik, J. (2009) Fashion: the key concepts. Oxford: Berg.