Week 7 - Fashion Evolution

Alyssa Vang - ASA 141 - Week 7 - Fashion Evolution

As a designer, I feel like fashion is a very common way people express themselves about how the feel or how they want other people to see them. Fashion exists because people whether want to be recognized or do it as a hobby; there are many definitions to what fashion means, it just depends on the person. It's one of the largest industries in the world and it's all a competition because everybody is always trying to find new ways to style clothes or design new ways of how clothes can be worn. From my perspective I feel like so much clothes has evolved in the past two centuries, I think as designers, we're starting to run out of ideas of what we should do and most of the time when people are designing couture there is a larger creativity idea for that but as for ready to wear it's a bit of a struggle. Why are we constantly trying to find new ways of clothes when our old ones aren't even 'out of style' yet? How does wearing clothes affect us as human beings when in the past people didn't even wear clothes at all? This makes me think around the idea of fast fashion and how it's becoming a large trend for young adults like me and my classmates and young teenagers. When I read about the Japanese teenagers and how they are evolving their fashion sense, it gives me two types of feelings. The first thing I thought about was 'wow, these ladies are going places because they know what they want in the fashion world' but another part of me is seeing how nature is apart of how we don't use up all our clothes. When fashion is constantly thriving through and trends people tend to always want to follow along because they want to be recognized and treated like everyone else and they are able to do this by going through as fashion. This reminded me of a reading we did in the beginning of the quarter where a cultural group wear clothes based on where they are from so that other villages will know not for because they want to show it off. 

Fashion continues to flourish, it's not always about cute tops and accessible bottoms but certain ways shirts are worn or what color it composes of. In the article Japanese Teens as Producers of Street Fashion by Yuniya Kuwamura explains how teenagers are starting to use street clothing as a way to recognize group identities. When they become apart of a certain society, they are proud of who they are and most of the time will correct you if you are right or wrong but they will be nice to educate what their identity is. Personally, when I design my clothes I have specific designs and inspirations and I enjoy when people ask me about it because it shows that they care about the origin of where it came from. 

Teenagers are one of the largest influences because they are the ones that educate and show the generations of what is in trend and what isn't. And because most of the time they wear their fashion trends to school, it gets shown to several others which then creates a trend because if they believe a specific clothes is cute, they will probably end up getting something similar. I find this interesting because this shows the difference between Asian Americans from the US and the Japanese from Japan. It's said in the article during one of the interviews that when they see that their friend has something cute, they only ask where they got it but would never go and buy the same thing, they rather go buy something else that will make them look kawaii! If most of us want to differentiate from one another then why do we have this thing called a trend? Why are most people dressing alike nowadays?