The word "fashion" derives from the French "façon", denoting the process of making something, creating a particular shape or style. According to the Dictionary of fashion history, its use in English language has been increasingly associated with clothing and the constant shifts and changes in personal adornment. To be more precise, the word "fashion" is used in three different meanings.
First, fashion refers to the textile industry, as when one says that she "works in fashion".
Second, fashion refers to the prevailing dress style during a particular time, as when one says that "bootcut jeans are back in fashion".
third, fashion also refers to a prevailing style in general during a particular time, as when one says that "poodles are out of fashion" or that "artificial intelligence is a new fashion in the scientific community". The third sense is just an extension of the second to any sort of objects and not only clothes, and reflects the feeling that really anything can be fashionable, be it a consumer good, an animal or even an abstract idea.
As Elizabeth Wilson wrote: “fashion is dress in which the key feature is rapid and continual changing of styles. Fashion, in a sense is change." Fashion is a system that puts value on what is new because it is new. Fashion is not a style, it is the process according to which styles replace each other, it is the rule that forbids any style to become too durable. For that reason, fashion establishes a certain relationship to time, and especially to present time and the idea of contemporariness. In the first section of this online course, we will focus on the links between fashion and modernity, and on the value fashion puts on novelty.
We will try to understand from various anthropological, economical and cultural perspectives, where this passion for new things come from, and why it has been prevailing in Western societies and beyond since the middle of the nineteenth Century. Fashion can also be seen as a social mechanism according to which, at some point in time, a group of people agrees on a certain kind of dress as "fashionable" and conforms to it. Fashion supports an inclination to uniformity and from this perspective is a source of social stability. In a way, a fashion movement or a trend is just a case of mimicry. But as we said, this convergence phenomenon is only temporary and is soon replaced by another "trend".
Jean Cocteau even defined fashion as “a lightning-quick epidemic which forces different and antagonistic persons all to obey the same mysterious order, to submit themselves to new habits which overturn their old ways of life, up to the moment when a new order arrives and obliges them to turn their coat once more”.Fashion is also driven by an urge to distinction, and can be used by individuals to separate themselves from the group and to claim their difference. Therefore fashion seems like a social paradox, being both a source of stability and instability, a way to belong to the group and a way to stand out. What is exactly the role of fashion as a social mechanism? Fashion is related to clothing and the way people dress. But fashion cannot be confused with clothes, as there are characteristics of clothes that seem irrelevant to fashion, or at least quite ancillary to it. Clothes are technical products, defined according to functional needs, like body coverage, protection, and the likes. Fashion is obviously not strongly concerned with the functional aspect of clothing, but more with its expressive or symbolic side. Fashion can thus be seen as a kind of language, that individuals can somehow use to make statements with their outfits.
The “product” that fashion brands deliver and fashion consumers shops belongs to a hybrid category, being at the same time a material object dedicated to the covering or the adornment of the wearer’s body, and an immaterial object loaded with symbolic values. In the last part of our journey, we will cover topics like the distinguishing attributes of fashion production, its know how, and the kind of creative skills that fashion requires. We will also dedicate specific studies to the fashion consumer and assess how fashion can play a part in the construction of the self, while being at the same time a prescriptive force of the group upon the individual.
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