Fashion is vital component of our global popular culture. The term fashion implies change; in the production, marketing, and purchase of apparel, change is fast and furious. Clothes and related accessories share characteristics with other commodities of popular culture. Styles in both music and clothing, for example, are assimilated not only by designers and performers in the marketplace but also by consumers in their everyday choices and actions. Recent influences in clothing fashion may be traced to styles from a variety of subcultures, racial/ethnic communities, and leisure-interest groups. Elements of popular culture become fused when a person's appearance - a "look" - is associated with a preference for reggae, heavy metal, or country-western music, or skateboarding, biking, or golfing. Like popular music, media, and literature, fashion is incorporated into everyday life: taken for granted because it is so familiar, and accessible because it is so populist in orientation. Yet fashion comes to us with a price tag.
What is for sale in the postmodern global marketplace: Objects, images, and the marketers' constructions of reality. On a daily basis, we are bombarded with these facets of our popular culture - in the media, on the streets, in clothing stores, and even in our wardrobes. We behold diverse elements of fashion in appearance - in wholes or in parts. The essence of postmodern culture in the realm of appearance and fashion lies in the juxtaposition of component parts from different social, cultural and historic contexts. Traditional categories and boundaries collapse, or at least budge, as they are stretched by phenomena such as gender bending and the meshing and mixing of styles from different cultures and eras. Consider the following:
· Some rock stars in music videos promote androgyny, as men wear makeup and women sport short hairstyles. Singers such as David Bowie, Boy George, Mick Jagger, Annie Lennox of the Eurythmics, and Tracy Champman present images that lead us to rethink the meaning of gender, at least in a visual and possibly unconscious way.
· Dolls from Guatemala are converted in the global capitalist marketplace to decorate jewelry and hair accessories costing several times as much as the originals. They are worn with brightly colored separates from a popular manufacturer.
· A thirteen-year-old boy wears a 1960s-style, tie-dyed T-shirt with acid-washed jeans and high-status athletic shoes. His hair is long in spots and cannot be "placed" neatly in any decade.
Appearance and fashion tend to be eclectic, visually stimulating, and confusing when consciously contemplated. How can we explain this complexity of style in the contemporary marketplace, and what is its impact on our perception of self? Are we losing ourselves in a sea of surface-level judgments, as image seems to become increasingly important for politicians and celebrities, as well as for ourselves? Witness the increase in elective cosmetic surgery (for men as well as women), the explosion of the "fitness" market, higher incidences of anorexia nervosa and bulimia, and the importance of designer or status labels.
Or are we reaching new heights of understanding about ourselves and developing new boundaries as we seem to be experimenting more and more with the aesthetics of appearance? This experimentation ranges from
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