Fashion
is something we deal with everyday. Even people who say they
don't care what they wear choose clothes every morning that
say a lot about them and how they feel that day.
One certain thing in the fashion world is change. We are constantly
being bombarded with new fashion ideas from music, videos, books,
and television. Movies also have a big impact on what people
wear. Ray-Ban sold more sunglasses after the movie Men In Black.
Sometimes a trend is world-wide. Back in the 1950s, teenagers
everywhere dressed like Elvis Presley.
Who dictates fashion?
Musicians and other cultural icons have always influenced what
we're wearing, but so have political figures and royalty. Newspapers
and magazines report on what Hillary Clinton wears. The recent
death of Diana, the Princess of Wales, was a severe blow to
the high fashion world, where her clothes were daily news.
Even folks in the 1700s pored over fashion magazines to see
the latest styles. Women and dressmakers outside the French court
relied on sketches to see what was going on. The famous French
King Louis XIV said that fashion is a mirror. Louis himself was
renowned for his style, which tended towards extravagant laces
and velvets.
Clothes separate people into groups.
Fashion is revealing. Clothes reveal what groups people are
in. In high school, groups have names: "goths, skaters, preps,
herbs." Styles show who you are, but they also create
stereotypes and distance between groups. For instance, a
businessman might look at a boy with green hair and multiple
piercings
as a freak and outsider. But to another person, the boy is
a strict conformist. He dresses a certain way to deliver
the message of rebellion and separation, but within that
group,
the look is uniform. Acceptance or rejection of a style is
a reaction to the society we live in.
Fashion is a language which tells a story about
the person who wears it. "Clothes create a wordless means of communication
that we all understand," according to Katherine Hamnett,
a top British fashion designer. Hamnett became popular when her
t-shirts with large messages like "Choose Life" were
worn by several rock bands.
There are many reasons we wear what we wear.
Protection from cold, rain and snow: mountain climbers wear
high-tech outerwear to avoid frostbite and over-exposure.
Physical
attraction: many styles are worn to inspire "chemistry."
Emotions:
we dress "up" when we're happy and "down" when
we're upset.
Religious expression: Orthodox Jewish men wear long black suits and Islamic
women cover every part of their body except their eyes.
Identification and tradition: judges wear robes, people in the military wear
uniforms, brides wear long white dresses.
Fashion is big business. More people are involved in the buying, selling
and production of clothing than any other business in the world. Everyday,
millions of workers design, sew, glue, dye, and transport clothing to stores.
Ads on buses, billboards and magazines give us ideas about what to wear, consciously,
or subconsciously.
Clothing can be used as a political weapon. In nineteenth century England,
laws prohibited people from wearing clothes produced in France. During twentieth
century communist revolutions, uniforms were used to abolish class and race
distinctions.
Fashion is an endless popularity contest
High fashion is the style of a small group of men and women
with a certain taste and authority in the fashion world.
People
of wealth and position, buyers for major department stores,
editors and writers for fashion magazines are all part of
Haute Couture ("High Fashion" in French). Some
of these expensive and often artistic fashions may triumph
and become
the fashion for the larger majority. Most stay on the runway.
Popular fashions are close to impossible to trace. No one can
tell how the short skirts and boots worn by teenagers in England
in 1960 made it to the runways of Paris, or how blue jeans became
so popular in the U.S., or how hip-hop made it from the streets
of the Bronx to the Haute Couture fashion shows of London and
Milan.
It's easy to see what's popular by watching sit-coms
on television: the bare mid-riffs and athletic clothes of 90210,
the baggy
pants of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. But the direction of fashion
relies on "plugged-in" individuals to react to events,
and trends in music, art and books.
"In the perspective of costume history, it is plain that
the dress of any given period is exactly suited to the actual
climate of the time." according to James Laver, a noted
English costume historian. How did bell-bottom jeans fade into
the designer jeans and boots look of the 1980s into the baggy
look of the 1990s? Nobody really knows.
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