BryanBoy
The other day I had lunch with a family friend of mine. We got into a discussion about history - my major at uni - and the theory of writing history, or historiography, in a western culture. At the end of the lunch he turned to me and said, with a note of surprise in his tone, "Well, you're quite clever, aren't you, Hannah?". The implication being, of course, that I don't look it, or more importantly, as my mum later pointed out, I don't dress it. I don't think I've ever been more patronised in my life, or more frustrated with the general perception of fashion in society.
Anna Wintour touched upon it at the very start of The September Issue. "There's something about fashion that scares people," she intoned, in a way that made you think perhaps it was SHE who was the scariest thing about fashion. But in fact, she's right. The dismissal of fashion is on the grounds of intimidation, not stupidity. People do fear fashion, for whatever reason. It's silly and unfounded, as most fears often are, but no less real. They fear fashion because of the way it can monopolise emotions and polarise opinion, for the way it can commandeer and, apparently, trivialise thought. The fact is, People who take fashion seriously are considered to be, well, not serious. "Just because you put on a beautiful Carolina Herrera dress or a pair of J Brand blue jeans instead of something from K-Mart doesn't make you a stupid person", Anna said at the end of her introduction. And as much as I disagree with her on many accounts, on this she is 100% correct. I would go a step further and say that the decision, the conscious decision to wear clothes for whatever reasons, does not in any way shape or form make you a stupid person. It in facts puts you in touch with a history of dress and costume that is tied up irrevocably with civilisation itself.
For my historiography subjects at uni we have to do a journal review, and I'm going to do mine of Fashion Theory, the journal published quarterly by FIT and edited by Valerie Steele. Their mission statement is to understand "fashion as the cultural construction of embodied identity". I could have had my pick from about 15 journals, however, specialising in the history and study of fashion, including "Dress" the journal of the Costume Institute of America (think the Met Gala exhibitions). I think because fashion is just something you wear, something you throw on your back while you go about doing real, important things like career and relationships it is easy to forget that there is a legitimate study of fashion as theory and as practice, like any other discipline. The movement of thought in recognition of fashion is concurrent to the movement of thought in recognition of other areas of popular culture - music, art, film, television. Today, at least, we are moving towards a greater understanding and study of areas like cultural studies and social sciences that attempt to understand why we do the things we do (and why we do them differently than the generation before us).
But fashion still remains outside this. Why is that? Why, if we can acknowledge the importance of, say, rock music in the 1950s or performance art in the 1980s does the rise of street-style in the 00s remain an untouched area of interest? Because fashion scares people. Sometimes it even scares me. But what scares me more is people who still, still, think that somehow "cleverness" and fashion can't go hand in hand. Are we still, even now, stuck in the old stereotypes of decades before? When will we move forward? Can we move forward? These are questions fashion has to try and answer.
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