Fashion

What is Fashion?

Session 5

In this Lecture, we discussed the background of fashion, what it means as an art and how it varies.

It can be viewed in many different ways all over the world. Fashion changes completely from culture to culture. Some countries, or even continents do not even consider fashion because of religion or just simply unfeasibility. It also show status. Being wealthy or well off can show massively through what you wear. This isn't a generalisation but a lot of wealthy people will wear designer clothing or smart clothing such as suits.

Music is a big influence over fashion as well. This is usually more to do with fashion within youth or high street fashion. By looking at someone wears, you can sometimes tell what music they enjoy and even where the music is from. People that listen to heavy metal music quite often have either really long and unlooked after hair or completely shaven head. Tattoos come into play quite a lot with the fashion within music too. Wearing really dark and baggy clothes as opposed to sporty clothing makes it easy to tell whether the person listens to say goth music or hip hop and rap. (as mentioned above, this does not apply to all and cannot be seen as a generalisation).

Fashion as an Art can be completely different and diverse. The clothing/garments designed may not be created for everyday wearability. Some items are purely to how off a certain skill with the creation or to express an emotion through colour and style. It can only be appreciated if the audience can understand it or make something of it if its abstract. This is usually presented through a Catwalk show.

Examples of this are below.

Very much like logos, fashion can communicate a message, idea or a meaning about something or someone. It can be explicit or implicit the same as logos too.

The History

When fashion became an art or a profession, Charles Frederick Worth (1826-1895) was named the first fashion designer. Before fashion designers derived, clothing would have been sewn and produced by seamstresses and drapers. After Worth changed his role in the world (draper), he opened the first fashion house in what was the fashion capital of the world, Paris, also known as 'maison de couture'. He was also the first person to label his Art ion the fashion industry and was seen to be the relief of corsets for women.

Here are some examples of his work.