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“fashion as communication” door Malcom Barnard

Malcolm Barnard is Senior Lecturer in Visual Culture at Loughborough University and an internationally recognized theorist of visual culture.

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Every day we make decisions about the social status and role of the people we meet based on what they are wearing: we treat their clothes as ‘social hieroglyphics’, to use Marx’s term, which conceal, even as they communicate, the social position of the wearer.

Fashion and clothing, that is, may be the most significant ways in which social realations between people are constructed, experienced and understood. The things that people wear give shape and colour to social distinctions and inequalities....

In Western society, the term ‘fashion’ is often used as a synonym of the terms ‘adornment’, ‘style’ and ‘dress’. There are also those who use the word as a synonym of ‘clothes’ or ‘clothing’.

So, it could be said that, while all clothing is an adornment, not all clothing is fashion, and that while all fashion is dress, not all dress is fashion, for the same reason. And it could be said that, while all fashion is adornment, not all fashion is clothing. Some fashion is tattooing or cicatrisation. Similarly, while every item of dress will be in a particular style, not every style will be fashion, as styles go in and out of fashion. And, while very item of dress will be after a certain fashion, not all fashions will be stylish; it is well known that some fashions set out to be anti-style. (blz11)

...The permutations of these terms could be multiplied and the differences in their senses explored further. But the above should give some idea of the ‘complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing’... (blz11)

Joanne Entwistle makes another attempt to define ‘fashion’ and ‘dress’. She defines dress as ‘an activity of clothing the body with and aesthetic element (as in ‘adornment’)’ and she defines fashion as ‘a specific system of dress’.

Anne Hollander provides the same definition, suggesting that while everybody has to get dressed in the morning and go about the day’s business...what everybody wears to do this, has taken different forms in the West for about seven hundred years, and that is what fashion is.

People appear to need to be social and individual at the same time, and fashion and clothing are ways in which this complex set of desires or demands may be negotiated. (blz12)

‘We want to look like our friends, but not become clones’.

The point being that fashionable clothing is used in western capitalist societies to affirm both membership of various social and cultural groups and individual, personal identity.

Western societies wear fashion. They wear fashion in that what they wear may be found all over western civilisation at one time: their clothing does not vary so much in space, as every fashionable westerner will me wearing much the same thing, ‘the fashion’. But it will vary rapidly in time: what the modish westerner is wearing will soon be replaced with something else.

...the Peruvian Indian’s poncho may be seen being worn today, as it was 200 years ago. Polhemus and Procter develop these ideas still further. They explicitly identify fixed dress with anti-fashion and modish dress with fashion.  The Queens coronation gown is ‘traditional “fixed” and anti-fashion...designed to function as a symbol of continuity. Dior’s ‘tulip-line’ dress, however, was fashion. It ‘announced that a new season had arrived’ and, in being different to the ‘princess line’ which had preceded it in 1951, functioned as a symbol of discontinuity and change. ...Polhemus and Procter relate these two gowns and their funchtions to the understanding of time that they reflect.