Fashion is an affiliation that one represents through their choice, or lack thereof, of any number of articles of clothing, jewelry, and other adornments upon their own body. As a symbol, it directly represents the individual’s culture, beliefs, upbringing, current/past situations, thoughts, feelings, and the like. In essence, fashion is a symbolic and unique representation of the individual’s self. Thus, by being mindfully aware of how others dress themselves, we may begin to understand how those particular individuals may perceive/express/represent themselves or their on-going lives/situation(s). It represents how a person chooses to delineate themselves into categorical specifics that are themselves an extension of the biological categories already established.
Oftentimes, instead of attempting to describe the biological in a straightforward way (i.e. when I look at you I am establishing the viability of healthy offspring or betterment of social standing to increase my mating viability for future offspring, and so will scan your body to look for markers of health and social standing), fashion is a means of hindering these straightforward, sensory cues with a veil of deception. How often have you heard such phrases like, “black is slimming”, “vertical lines to look skinnier, horizontal lines to look wider” or seen how fashion has been used to create illusions of the truth (e.g. make up, colognes/perfumes, hair products, shoulder pads, bust pads, corsets, balled-up socks)? It appears that outside of a tool used to mitigate the forces of nature such as cold, wetness, and heat; it has been used to also filter, translate, encode, and relay information.
There is more to fashion than just putting on clothes that make us “feel comfortable”. It is a way to establish oneself within a hierarchical group, whether that is established socially, culturally, or otherwise. These associations can intermingle and show an individual’s association with multiple groups simultaneously. A man finding himself in western culture during the 1950s could be wearing a suit both as a model of socioeconomic class and personally established and adhered culture. The Germans of the Nazi regime and the Chinese of the Mao Era of Communism understood this power of symbols in establishing an individual’s group identity when they established the particular uniforms and colors to be worn in their society at that time. Its purpose was a conscious attempt at fully establishing the individual within a group in an attempt to make the individual become the group.
Fashion on the other end of the conscious spectrum can be considered a personal form of artistic expression in which the symbols of the group consciousness become the thoughts of the individual, such that the group becomes the individual within individualized expression. Fashion is no longer a form of establishing oneself within a hierarchical group. Instead, it becomes a means by which the individual is able to express their observations and experiences from within the system containing these various, interacting groups. Fashion ceases to be associated with any groups as it is now an expression of all groups. A person of this mind accepts all visual expressions from all cultures, societies, times, localities, environments, etc as a palette from which to draw upon and connect with as a source of unified energy. The group identity, in this case, would encapsulate all forms of identity and draw upon those that most resonate with the individual. It would be a form of fashion that does not recognize boundaries and delineations whether social, cultural, gender-based, or otherwise.
Fashion upon this spectrum of expression between the nodes of art and institution all share a similar function. This function is to share information between individuals along this means of expression. Each particular individual is inherently located along these nodes, for as long as the awareness of such a node exists within a minimum of one referential frame in some degree. For each individual is embedded within the referential frame of fashion as long as there is one individual with that perspective. So even if a person chooses not to wear any clothing, that person is still embedded within the ideological system of fashion for as long as the person remains a reference point to another utilizing the system. If people move beyond fashion as a referential system of perceptual reality, then at that point, ‘fashion’ as a concept may cease to exist as an aspect of conscious reality (for it still remains a means to exchange information and interpret reality).
words of babel 