Fashion as Individualism or Fashion as Institution?
Grace Petersen
Last week we covered how fashion production impacts various people across the globe, and more often than we like with fatal consequences. This week we move back into a more personified lens and examine how fashion functions as a signifier for society. Jonnson and Taylor write "Contemporary Western culture tends to assume that dress serves primarily to express individuality" (from National Colors: Ethnic Minorities in Vietnamese Public Imagery), and we see how this is a large factor in the success of fast fashion as an industry, but fashion does not only serve as a tool of individuality but a means of communicating identity within a group. In the reading for this week, we see how in Vietnam national dress has become a major tool of propaganda which writes over the diversity of the numerous ethnic minorities while at the same time claiming to represent all of Vietnam equally, contrasting this we see how with muslim Hijabis in the west the requirements of religious observance are being overlooked in favor of individualized statements of fashion. While both of these two occurrences are both group and individual expressions of dress, the ways in which they are enacted are on the scale of individual identity versus group cohesion. What I find most interesting is in examining how the variants of expression shift according to the political situation surrounding these people, which belays just how political fashion and dress are underneath all the fabric and colors.
(Photo credit: mvslim.com)
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