What is the Relevance of Fashion?
Fashion is often given a bad rap: it's frivolous, it's about vanity, status, wealth and greed. Fashion is fleeting. It won't last, whereas its more distinguished sibling, art, is about humanity's higher aims and lasts through the proverbial ages. But we all know it is not as simple as that. Art is also very much a status symbol, and at the upper end commands far higher prices. Art is also prone to fashion: it is prey to tastes, interests and prejudices often to a severe degree, even if the varnish of objective good taste is preserved to maintain art's good name.
In truth, while fashion has its abuses and vulgarities as art has, it also serves key purposes, especially in advancing our identity—how we want to be read and received by the outside world. Many of us do not feel complete or whole without clothes, make-up and accessories, which tends to debunk that clothes are just about surface: we need these things to make us whole, to make us be. Fashion and dress can give us mobility and visibility where we otherwise would have little or none.
Fashions, the work of great designers, can startle and move us. They can shift us from our comfort zones and make us think differently about ourselves and others. But we also need to be aware of the dark underside of fashion, which is fast fashion. The fashion industry is one of the biggest devastators of the environment. While we can afford to appreciate fashion's meaning and relevance, we can also afford to be more minimalist in what we buy.
Fashion: for the frivolous, feeble and flamboyant?
A show from 2020 on Netflix, about super-rich Chinese, Bling Empire, drives this home in full force: fashion is all about the ostentatious display of wealth. The characters in this reality-documentary are driven by it to the point of caricature, and yet they seem to inhabit this caricature with great ease. They are playful about their fetishes and superficial attitudes. Maybe because they can. It is all the about the continual affirmation of what they can have and what others can't have. Everything in their lives is built around self-image and the spectacle of their hedonism and their consumption. It makes for pretty hard viewing after about fifteen minutes in my view.
Then there's the prejudice that fashion is feminine, and art is more masculine: one is all appearances, the other has hidden intellectual depths. Women favour fashion, and men prefer art. Indeed, one of the earliest commentators on fashion, one of the founders of what we now know as sociology, Georg Simmel, equates fashion with women. (This is a bias of his time: his writings contain some significant and lasting insights, sexism aside.)
This bias is still alive with us today but in a little watered-down way. Although you have the "New Man" in the 1980s—the man that looks after himself, cooks, and buys skin-care products—to be too interested in fashion is to be gay. There's a pretty tenacious equation which is: fashion equals flamboyance and flamboyance equals gay.
One of the most brilliant send-ups of this is in the hilarious series, Curb your Enthusiasm, by Larry David (former collaborator with Jerry Seinfeld in Seinfeld). Larry (he plays himself) is dating a woman who is strangely oblivious to the fact that he is gay. Larry is waiting for his girlfriend to get ready when her son, Greg, introduces himself. He announces how he loves the television show, Project Runway because he loves "the fah-shun" gesticulating in an exaggeratedly flamboyant way. Here's the clip:
But let's turn from some of the prejudices and look more deeply into the relevance of fashion
The easy answer
This essay could begin with the sort of platitude that you may find in an advertising posting on any spam, blog or magazine, on any given day: that fashion is all around us, that it is an integral part of our lives. It is an essential component of what makes us who we are. We may be so accustomed to these kinds of banalities that we take little notice of them and nod our heads in tacit acceptance and move on.
We all wear clothes, we all make choices about these clothes, and it is a given that these clothes offer an indication, however routine and small about how we want to be seen. It usually begins with the gender with which we identify and then corresponds to the kinds of groups we wish to inhabit: home, office, supermarket, gym, a night out.
These are all such givens and are so ubiquitous that we may not stop questioning fashion's relevance.
To begin with, it may surprise some that it is a relatively recent question, one that has persisted for only the last three hundred or so years. Before the eighteenth century, there was a limited fashion industry, but it was available only to the rich and privileged. Most people had to settle with mere clothing.
Fashion, clothing, dress and the fashion system
When we speak of "fashion" in the broadest sense, we also refer to clothing and dress, each of which implies differing degrees of choice and practicality. To clothe oneself is relatively prosaic compared to dressing which usually implies more care and choice for the sake of an occasion. Clothing in the most basic sense is demographic and utilitarian: historically speaking it entails what material is available that suits the climate and the activity.
Dress involves these factors but in a more ethnographic sense, where there is a more complicated system of signs, where the garment is more to be seen as a sematic surface on which can be traced the elements of belonging to a gender, class, and culture.
When we move to fashion in the sense of "being fashionable", we refer to a more elaborate system of signs, otherwise known as the "fashion system". This system contains the elements of clothing and dress mentioned above and includes two crucial features: economics and choice.
The fashion system is inseparable with the rise of industrialization and a free market economy. It is both a cause and an effect of the notion of the free and independent individual of the Enlightenment. Just as it was remarked that after the French Revolution, anyone with the right amount of money had access to foods that were previously denied them, so it was with clothes and all other commodities.
This redistribution of values (goods and signs) was already present in previous decades and contributed to the Revolution itself, a conflagration after a growing set of entitlements and needs.
The role of fashion, clothing and dress cannot be underestimated during this period. This is evidenced from the outset by the epithet used for the revolutionary group, the sans-culottes, where they took as their sartorial difference—not wearing the breaches associated with the formal wear of the well-to-do of the former regime— as synonymous with their political ideology.
Idealized sans-culotte by Louis-Léopold Boilly (1761–1845). Via Wikipedia
And while men and women had always indulged in disguise and masquerade over the ages of civilization, the eighteenth century began to witness the use of fashion to impress, manipulate and deceive in a way that was far more subtle than fancy dress.
In a word, fashion was a vehicle, if not the vehicle of social mobility. The appearance of wealth and status was almost as important as wealth and status itself, more critical in some situations.
Fashion and subculture from bohemians, dandies and punks
While the central role of fashion to advance social standing is something of a given, what has been given more attention by fashion historians over the last twenty or so years has been how subcultures have made use of alternative fashions to assert their place within society in ways that were not reducible to signs of class or wealth.
The rise of bohemians and bohemia in the years after Napoleon's fall, the Restoration then after the July Revolution of 1830 is historically the first such group whose distinctively alternative image in relation to society went far beyond just wearing trousers. There have been various attempts to define bohemians with some historians claiming them as historical, while others described bohemianism as a tendency that has examples to the present day.
In broad terms, the bohemian is an artist who distances him or herself from straightlaced fashions of the establishment.
The flowing scarf is now an amiable cliché, although George Sand's dragging continues to be an object of fascination. With the premium given to expressive freedom, bohemianism quickly found itself associated with loose morals. Its darkest moment was during the Wilde trial of 1895 when "bohemian" was used as a euphemism for "pervert" and "homosexual".
While emerging a little earlier than bohemianism at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the dandy is a little harder to define. It too would become a powerful means of self-expression that would overreach class boundaries, although dandies are known for their fine clothes and the care taken in all aspects of their appearance. The dandy was an important figure in modernity, captured by famous dandies of the nineteenth century, from Lord Byron to Barbey D'Aurevilly (who wrote the first treatise on the dandy) and Baudelaire (who also wrote about dandies).
The dandy remains a point of fascination for fashion historians and novelists and artists because they are an embodiment of a special, and perhaps hitherto unique, form of self-expression that was the closest thing to the self as a work of art. The dandy is the prototype of what would later be called body and gender performance.
The first acknowledged dandy, George "Beau" Brummel is remembered entirely for being a dandy, his life as a dandy, and his influence on other subsequent dandies (in his insistence of clean linen and sharp dapper clothing over unnecessary ornamentation), and nothing else.
His achievement was himself. In this regard, the dandy is an example of the unity between fashion and art—as we identify it from a contemporary perspective, that is.
The inheritors the bohemian and the dandy are seen in the various subcultures in the era after the Second World War, driven by protest and the growing desire for social and sexual experimentation. Glam rock and punk were powerful forms of subcultural expression in Britain, while the hippies and yippies were self-ordained harbingers of peace, freedom and unconstrained love.
All of these types used their appearance—clothing, hair and accoutrements such as jewellery—as a conscious device to challenge the status quo, to question long-held establishment beliefs, to respond to the tensions of the Cold War, and to sound protests against what were seen as social values and traditions deemed repressive and anachronistic.
The image of punk—driven in the 1970s by style gurus Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood—was an unapologetically aggressive style that was also eclectic and DIY. On a scale more than ever before, fashion was used as a form of social protest while the material of fashion was also open to all.
Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood outside London’s Bow Street magistrates court after being remanded on bail for fighting, June 1977. Photograph: Mirrorpix/Getty Images
With Westwood, and at roughly the same time with Rei Kawakubo but with different motivations, tears and stresses in a piece of fabric were no longer seen as undesirable but as suggesting a different way of thinking and wearing clothing.
In the 1970s, clothing became a critical tool for rejecting normative codes of social etiquette on multiple levels, including class, sex, gender, and race. From Margiela to McQueen, designers would develop from these subcultural styles and modalities to find new ways of expressing the rich variety of human identity and experience.
By the 1980s it was no longer unusual for performers to collaborate with designers, such as a longstanding on-and-off partnership with Gaultier and Madonna.
Contemporary fashion
In today's fashion, which we simply and instead abstractly call "contemporary fashion" (in line with contemporary art), to distinguish it from the postmodernism of the 1980s and '90s, there is a rough consensus that the kinds of social agency wielded by the likes of bohemians and punks are no longer with us. Instead, the revolutionary and rebarbative historical styles have devolved into tropes.
For instance, David Beckham's famous "punk" hairstyle or the studs on your belt: Beckham was using the frisson of punk without being punk per se, while your belt draws from BDSM styling to add some level of indefinable accent to your look without any implications on your sexual interests.
To many, this may seem like a loss of force for fashion, a retreat into styling, signification without a creditable or recognizable destiny, which all amounts to a kind of emasculation. Alternatively, we can view fashion as having a dazzlingly wide range of resources at its disposal, which at best it uses to considerable effect.
What we have begun to see is a greater prevalence of designer that exploring critical relationship s in society and the human spirit that was once reserved for art. The fashion shows have come to be spectacles that are immersive hybrids of art, rock concerts, music video and technical phantasmagoria.
Together with this, we have seen the beginnings of a new and discrete genre, fashion film, led by fashion photographer, Nick Knight of SHOWstudio. The fashion films by designer Gareth Pugh and filmmaker Ruth Hogben made under SHOWstudio's auspices are works in their own right, causing one to ask whether the garments were made for the sake of the film more than anything else.
Meanwhile, designers such as Michele of Gucci and Rick Owens stage catwalks in unconventional settings to advance ideas about garment, body and race that would have been unthinkable to the "classic" designers such as Dior or Valentino. We might say that, guided and accelerated in no small part by the Internet, fashion has become a rich, subtle and dynamic device for exploring the new modes of being, from virtualization to gender fluidity.
Suppose we use vulgar statistic s such as visitation numbers of exhibitions such as those held by the Fashion Institute in the Metropolitan Museum of New York. In that case, there are certain strains of fashion that are now incontestable competitors to contemporary artists for commentary and reflection on what it means to be alive at this time. Fashion has pollinated into many spheres. In the hands of particular designers, it has found a level of criticality and inventiveness that brings its secondary status with regard to art into acute disrepute.
The opening of the annual Fashion Institute's exhibition coincides with the "Met Gala", now the incontestable number one on the international fashion calendar.
Madonna Met Gala outfit. Via Vanity Fair
But we must also bear in mind that fast fashion is an environmental hazard
Yet these many positive considerations should not blind us to the fact that, for the most part, we are not part of the élite industry, which we only see from afar. By and large, we are the consumers and wearers of fast fashion.
The fashion industry is one of the world's most severe and widespread environmental scourges. Plastic particles too small to see have infected most of the world's water systems.
Contemporary fashion may be vying with contemporary art, but it has other obligations to turn to, which means that we need to be more thoughtful and less rapacious consumers. The relevance of fashion lies in finding conscience and reorienting its systems and values in the global market.
