Fashion can be art. It is psychology, sociology, history, identity (religion, sexuality, gender), politics, and commerce. It is the material of the everyday and a vehicle for profound human performance; shelter and superfluity. Fashion—garmenture—is, literally, significant. So why is it so hard to talk about?...When your favorite childhood game is dress up and you grow up in a feminist household that sees fashion as capitalist frivolity, when that game follows you, obsessively, into adulthood, a crisis is inevitable; there still exists this notion of being “too smart for fashion.”
We are at a point in cultural history when once disparate mediums and fields of production are collapsing into each other. We look at paintings on screens and print digital photographs onto t-shirts. Film, music, literature, painting, sculpture, photography, along with “new media”—like the blogroll or interactive video, even holograms—are all just avenues, often cofunctioning avenues, used to 1. explore thought, 2. create beauty, and 3. accrue capital. Fashion is part of this network. Think artist collaborations, museum exhibitions, filmic costume design, and the rise of the fashion film. And yet, outside of the academy (where the study of fashion is flourishing), fashion still has trouble with the “explore thought” part. We don’t yet have much in the way of a popular critical discourse on fashion. It’s about time we integrate fashion into our elitist tradition of cultural criticism.
How can we write and think critically about fashion? And can we imagine new ways of looking at it?
-Nafiinu
Derived from:
http://bullettmedia.com/article/writing-fashion-good/
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