Changing of Fashion styles - Essay Example

Amid constant changes and transformations that are ongoing in our modern feverish world most of us have developed a kind of antidote to such instability - ignorance of it, and attitude to rapid and often drastic changes in technological, social, economic, cultural and other realms of our life as to an inevitable characteristic of the development of human societies. While to a large degree this assumption is really true, nevertheless if we choose a path of ignorance we are destined to remain unaware of the actual causes that underlie and regulate many aspects of our life. And this lack of understanding, I would argue, is a real dander for the values that our society holds so dear, like liberty of thought and expression. Indeed, if we do not fully realise what makes us choose one or another thing in life, how can we pretend to be truly free? To see how these general considerations apply in reality, we may turn our attention to a phenomenon with which all the Western societies have been increasingly preoccupied during the last couple of centuries, and the significance of which grew in the twentieth century to the level when this phenomenon turned into the most powerful fetish of modernity. This profound phenomenon is fashion, and aside from its elevated status this field of human creativity by means of the continual changing of fashion styles perhaps in the most persuasive way serves as a manifesto of the constant change as a slogan of humanity. However, it is my firm belief that the transience of fashion has its deep roots that connect it with some fundamental qualities of the social structure we are living in. With these considerations in mind, let us on the example of the continual changing of fashion styles try to take a closer look at the interplay of the promise of identity reinforcement that fashion apparently offers and the notion of obsolescence as its inevitable hidden companion that may in the end turn out to be the real driving force behind fashion as such. That fashion has since its inception been involved into the process of creation and confirmation of personal and social identities of people can be understood from the very definitions of both these terms. Indeed, we can define identity as a set of individual characteristics that enables a person to be recognised and known (Giddens 1991, p.38), and the search for such an identity that has been central to the development of modern individualism. In this connection, the truthful observation of Elizabeth Wilson pays a due tribute to the role that our clothes play in the procedure of identity formation as she says: “. . . clothes are so much part of our living, moving selves . . .” (Wilson 2003, p.1). In fact, throughout history we can find exuberant examples of assignment to clothes and fashion of symbolic meanings that were changing as soon as symbols they were intended to convey were gaining or losing popularity. For one, until the early twentieth century there was a general preference for plumpness of women as an elitist quality around which the fashion of the time was built, but when the level of life of most people grew so that a proper nutrition was a lesser problem, the female plumpness lost its appeal, and instead an image of a thin woman began to be valued (Fraser 1998, p.42). And during the whole century afterwards and up until our times the fashion has been adopting various forms, following new trends, and discounting them in favour of something newer, but not for long, in this way turning into ". . . dress in which the key feature is rapid and continual changing of styles" (Wilson 2003, p.3). At this point, we may begin to wonder whether the fashion indeed represents such a vanguard social force that, akin to pure art, is never satisfied with its achievements and always longs for new perspectives? Well, while a high fashion is indeed a form of artistic self-expression of fashion artists, the mass fashion rather mostly manifests commercial technologies of sales promotion instead of artistic concerns. To bolster this case, we may appeal to the essay "Man in the Middle: The Designer" written in 1958 by C. Wright Mills. In his writing Mills introduces and examines a very important metaphorical figure within the society of his time, and surely not less or even more important in the contemporary Western societies - the designer. Mills gives his reasons for such a placement from the very outset as he observes: ". . . designer is at once a central figure in what I am going to call the cultural apparatus and an important adjunct of a very peculiar kind of economy" (Mills, 1958 p. 374). In this way, the author suggests that this figure exists at the conjunction of cultural and material spheres of our reality, and therefore is able to employ impetuses from both those realms to gain his ends. As we will see this fact determines the role and the power of influence of contemporary designer. So, who is the designer in our contemporary environment? It is a modern artist who has been engendered by the occurrence in the twentieth century of the two great social transformations within developed Western societies. The first such transformation was the shifted economic emphasis from production to distribution, and at the same time the addition to the traditional struggle for existence of a new factor of mass concern - the social status. The second development was the subordination of institutes of art, science and education to the capitalistic economic institutions of the state. It was these trends indicative of a overdeveloped society that had laid the foundation for the growing role of the designer. At the same time, the mentioned circumstances contribute to the fundamental confusion that may arise in the designer about his of her significance. Indeed, the problems of an overdeveloped society become the problems of designers themselves. Let us investigate how this happens according to Mills. First of all, Mills points out that our perception of the world is almost never immediate. Rather, we perceive elements of reality through the interplay of stereotypes. Those stereotypes are formed on the basis of the forms and patterns of communication, values and designs (in the broad meaning of the word) prevailing in the society. As tools to promote those vehicles of stereotypes transmission serve public and design arts, which reflect the interconnection between cultural stereotypes and our life. Moreover, such an interconnection may become so strong that stereotypic images and perceptions often substitute reality, and people may even lose ability to know who they are and to believe what they see until they obtain some offered interpretations. In this light, fashion, and more specifically clothes as such, has always belonged to the set of the most fundamental social stereotypes that were functioning as one of the principal elements of formation and structuring of social reality. Here, the urgent need for the social interpretative medium emerges and such medium is formed by what Mills calls cultural apparatus - "all those organizations and milieux in which artistic . . . work goes on . . . [and] all the means by which such work is made available to small circles, wider publics, and to great masses" (Mills 1958, p. 376). Briefly speaking, it is the cultural apparatus that begins to define the social environment and the nature of people and their values, and, not surprisingly, due to its social role fashion naturally falls within its field of influence. Now, the cultural apparatus may take on different forms, and in many Western societies its form is based on the commercial culture of the capitalist economy and its intrusive market technologies. Here, the important development that concerns the shift from the production to the distribution comes into play and introduces the phenomenon of merchandising, when the distributor assumes a higher role than the manufacturer and even the consumer. The reason for this lies in the ever increasing gap between the growing production capacity and existing demand. In this situation the ability of salesmen to procure adequate sales is of a paramount importance, and for this purpose it becomes necessary to find ways to spur consumption instead of becoming reconciled with its natural pace. In this way products replacement becomes one of the most important engines of the economy and the vague notion of obsolescence of products and concepts gets artificially boosted, and becomes the tool to shorten economic cycle in different markets, including those for which the notion of obsolescence has traditionally been almost completely alien. Ironically, while today we can hardly imagine a stable fashion, the constant change of styles was not always the case, as for example before the inception of the phenomenon of fashion in the early period of mercantile capitalism at the end of the Middle Ages (Wilson 2003, p.3) the variety of types of clothes could be characterised by their reflection of social identities they were aimed to confirm, and you can immediately witness the ubiquity of such a traditional differentiative function of clothes whenever you visit museums devoted to cultural heritages of different ethnic groups of the world, of which ethnic clothes takes a central place. On ground of this, Mills thinks that in such an economic environment as we have described the designer gets his main chance if she joins the forces of those who strive to promote sales. That her services will be in a great demand is justified by the recollection of another aspect of the social changes, namely that the concern about status becomes of almost equal significance with the striving to earn ones leaving. Indeed, the designer stands behind the almost magic appeal of products which makes them prestigious, and fashionable clothes are arguably among the most effective of all prestigious commodities. The designer is able to shape clothes and other products in such a way as to make them a constant advertising, and therefore especially seducing for consumers. However, many things come at a price, and the work of the designer is one of them. In fact, the main motive of the designer becomes after all not to make better products, but to make products sell better, which are not synonyms, because in order to promote sales the designer adds fictitious qualities to his creations, fictitious even if due to the fact that soon the designer will have to negate their value by the introduction of new products to replace the older ones. This tendency leads to the ultimate victory of the distributor over the consumers, and, paradoxically, over the artistic nature of the designer himself. This happens when the distributor is completely assured that he knows what people want and begins to command over the cultural workmen who become mere tools in his hands - they must either follow or be considered futile. Moreover, even if the designer becomes so successful that he or she can dictate to distributors, this does not make one free because, ironically, due to such a success the designer herself becomes a marketeer, a mere part of a merchandising advertising mechanism which makes culture noncultural in essence. This dilemma is especially pronounced in the filed of fashion that is essentially supposed to be creating beauty. But beauty as such is a very abstract notion and works of art that are thought to convey it are valued for their own sake despite their age, while the main measure of commercial fashion is utility as represented by commercial profit that stands in the constant need of generation by means of negation of its recent standards and expansion to new markets, as happened in Britain during 1950s when the growing economic prosperity enabled fashion to be also applied to young girls. But perhaps the most ironic strategy of fashion industry is its recurrent revival of fashion tendencies presented as the return of old fashion, which might be perceived as a last resort in situations when something new has yet to be created but profits are immediately awaited (Lehmann 2000, pp.233-240). While there is nothing wrong with the return to traditions as such, I believe that in the context that we have outlined the adoption by the designer of a strategy of merely following the demand, or creating that demand in the way that would guarantee the largest commercial payback, signifies the betrayal by the designer of the main principle of this profession. Indeed, as the designer could be thought of as a figure at the intersection between the artistic and the material, she could mediate between those two realms. However, the tendencies described by Mills show how the designer can abandon truly artistic ideals in favour of commercial profits. Now, all that we have discussed does not really mean that exclusively mercantile considerations underlie the whole fashion industry. Moreover, investing so much of our personalities into the choice of clothes we wear and products we use, many of us would hardly allow pervasive TV commercials and glossy magazines to fully dictate what we are encouraged to wear this season and what lifestyles we should stay away from. It is just that if we agree to blindly follow what is being imposed upon us by what Mills called cultural apparatus as the only possible and rightful answer to our need of finding our identity, we risk instead to get lost in our search. Sources Fraser, Laura. Losing It: False Hopes and Fat Profits in the Diet Industry. New York: Plume, 1998. Giddens, Anthony. Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Stanford University Press, 1991. Lehmann, Ulrich. Tigersprung: Fashion in Modernity. The MIT Press, 2000. Mills, Wright. Man in the Middle: The Designer. 1958. Wilson, Elizabeth. Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity. Rutgers University Press, 2003. Read More