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Communicating Fashion: Clothing, Culture, and Media
How did you decide what to wear today? Did you base your selection on comfort or style? Did you want to blend in or stand out - or was it just the cleanest outfit available?
We each make these decisions every day, reflecting how we view ourselves and impacting how others see us. Our choices matter - not just to us personally, but also to the magazine editors, brand ambassadors and trend forecasters who make a living by selling to us. Communicating Fashion introduces key concepts from the intersecting worlds of fashion and communication studies to connect how we all use clothing to express ourselves and how media systems support that process. In doing so, Myles Ethan Lascity explores social, cultural and ethical issues through the work of fashion journalism, brand promotions and the growing role of online influencers as well as the impact of film, television and art on self-image and expression.
Key
- Advertising, Branding and Fashion Retail
- Clothing, Art and Cultural Significance
- Clothing as Group and Cultural Norms
- Clothing, Identity and Interpersonal Communication
- Fashion News and Tastemaking
- Fashion, Social Media and Influencers
- Meaning within the Fashion System
- On-screen Clothing
We each make these decisions every day, reflecting how we view ourselves and impacting how others see us. Our choices matter - not just to us personally, but also to the magazine editors, brand ambassadors and trend forecasters who make a living by selling to us. Communicating Fashion introduces key concepts from the intersecting worlds of fashion and communication studies to connect how we all use clothing to express ourselves and how media systems support that process. In doing so, Myles Ethan Lascity explores social, cultural and ethical issues through the work of fashion journalism, brand promotions and the growing role of online influencers as well as the impact of film, television and art on self-image and expression.
Key
- Advertising, Branding and Fashion Retail
- Clothing, Art and Cultural Significance
- Clothing as Group and Cultural Norms
- Clothing, Identity and Interpersonal Communication
- Fashion News and Tastemaking
- Fashion, Social Media and Influencers
- Meaning within the Fashion System
- On-screen Clothing
- GenresFashion
288 pages, Hardcover
Published March 25, 2021
17 people want to read
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
June 4, 2021
1 – Communicating Fashion
p.15 – Fashion is an immaterial system of meaning created and applied to a variety of things, primarily consumable, material goods.
In comparison, Ingrid Brenninkmeyer notes that clothing is a “raw material” used in the creation of the fashion system. As such, we can understand clothing as the fabric-based garments – shirts, pants, dresses – that we wear every day.
p.16 – At various times, the term “dress” has been used as a stand-in for clothing and/or personal adornment.
Style will be used to describe the way something is made or put together to achieve a desired aesthetic.
3 – Clothing Dynamics in Groups and Cultures
p.63 – Camp, as described by Susan Sontag, involves playing up or exaggerating the artificiality of our appearances. Often, it has been attributed to drag queens, but the aesthetic has been garnering more mainstream attention from the prominence of the reality competition RuPaul’s Drag Race to a 2019 exhibition at the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Moreover, this speaks to a larger trend of acceptance of homosexuality and queer culture in general. Two high-profile examples of gender-bending include Jaden Smith, who wore a skirt in a 2016 Louis Vuitton campaign, and Billy Porter, the actor known for the musical Kinky Boots, who wore a Christian Siriano “tux ball gown” to the Oscars in 2019. As we acknowledge the complexity of gender beyond the male-female binary, unisex and more gender-fluid clothing is increasingly important. And, while there does not seem to be a large-scale adoption of skirts for men, having high-profile celebrities play with gender performance in this way is a step in the direction of more mainstream adoption. One day, Smith and Porter may be looked back at as trendsetters in the way Marlene Dietrich and Katharine Hepburn are for making pants acceptable for women.
8 – Digital Communication, Social Media, and Mediatization
p.173 – The internet was originally developed by a consortium of universities, including the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), Stanford university, the University of California, Santa Barbara and the University of Utah, along with the Advanced Research Projects Agency within the US Department of Defense. What came from these was a packet-switching network, meaning that when information was sent through this network, it would be broken down into small “packets” of information which were sent via the quickest path. The receiving computer would them reassemble the information. While the early internet would be used by government and universities during the 1960s and 1970s, it would take until 1989 for commercial networks to get onto the internet, led by CompuServe and America Online (AOL).
The early internet was somewhat different than what we’re accustomed to now, in that it was largely text-based and largely consisted of email and listservs. Even early computer operating systems were text-based and it would take until Windows 95 for the graphic interface to be widely adopted.
Eventually, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN, would help to develop the World Wide Web, which would standardize web addresses and coding language. This would allow the development of web browsers and led to the “internet” we’re accustomed to using today.
p.174 – In the 1990s there was a significant interest and growth in the internet as search engines like Yahoo, Excite and Lycos, email providers like Hotmail, and interest-driven space like the women’s site iVillage dominated. Website building and blogging also grew in importance: sites like Geocites, Tripod and Agelfire allowed users to build their own websites, while Live Journal and Xanga were dedicated to blogging platforms. While many internet firms were successful and decided to go public (i.e. sell stock), many went bankrupt in what would be know as the “dot-com bubble” in the early years of the 2000s. Some firms consolidated after the bubble burst, while other firms like Google, Yahoo, eBay, and Amazon would end up as the dominant internet sites.
However, in the 2000s there would be another revolution: social media. The simple social network site, Friendster, launched in 2002, and both LinkedIn and MySpace launched in 2003. This opened the door to the sites that still dominate the social media landscape like Facebook (originally launched for college students in 2004 and opened to everyone in 2006), YouTube (2005) and Twitter (2006). There would be other hiccups along the way such as the check-in-based Foursquare (now Swarm), the short-video-based Vine, and the anonymous geo-locator YikYak – all of which grew quickly in popularity only to fade shortly thereafter. Photo-based platforms including Pinterest (2009) Instagram (2010) and Snapchat (2011) would take off a bit later and are still in wide use as of this writing, as is TikTok (2016), the short-video-based platform.
p.175 – Many of the sites we consider “social media” started out as social network sites that allowed users to create profiles and connect and communicate with their network. However, as smartphone technology grew and these sites expanded and developed as publishing platforms, they helped build what we now call social media. Today, social media is generally understood to include social network sites and other forms of internet-based media, which allow users to connect with others, produce content (in whatever form), communicate with others and customize their profiles.
In many ways, the internet and digital communications are unlike any of the media that has come before it due to its flexibility and interactive nature.
9 – Fashion, Clothing and/as Art
p.196 – Designating something as “art” changes the way we understand it and communicate about it. Calling something art or an art confers a status on it and its related actions, thereby giving it greater cultural prominence and prestige. This status is generally given to works by cultural institutions including museums, critics and award organizations.
p.201 – Conceptual fashion has been the most useful in raising the status of fashion as an art from both inside and outside the academy. In fact, some have argued that creativity within such fashion designs – not truly intended to be “practical or utilitarian” – ultimately proves that fashion is an artform. Moreover, some of these designs have been intended to critique the fashion system of social structures as a whole. Francesca’s Granata’s work on experimental fashion argues that designers and artists like Rei Kawakubo, Leigh Bowery and even Lady Gaga have used clothing to critique normative discourses and bodily presentations. Examples like Kawakubo’s padded dresses and Leigh Bowery’s drag performances question the materiality and artifice of our personal appearances. When used in this way, clothing and appearance aim to be a more meaningful expression than the “consumable” way we generally think of clothing.
p.208 – As Julia Petrov writes, “Fashion within the museum environment takes on a heightened visuality at the expense of hapticity, due to the norms and rules surrounding the need for the preservation of objects, the physical arrangement of objects in the space, and the physical and visual relation of visitors to objects on display.”
p.15 – Fashion is an immaterial system of meaning created and applied to a variety of things, primarily consumable, material goods.
In comparison, Ingrid Brenninkmeyer notes that clothing is a “raw material” used in the creation of the fashion system. As such, we can understand clothing as the fabric-based garments – shirts, pants, dresses – that we wear every day.
p.16 – At various times, the term “dress” has been used as a stand-in for clothing and/or personal adornment.
Style will be used to describe the way something is made or put together to achieve a desired aesthetic.
3 – Clothing Dynamics in Groups and Cultures
p.63 – Camp, as described by Susan Sontag, involves playing up or exaggerating the artificiality of our appearances. Often, it has been attributed to drag queens, but the aesthetic has been garnering more mainstream attention from the prominence of the reality competition RuPaul’s Drag Race to a 2019 exhibition at the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Moreover, this speaks to a larger trend of acceptance of homosexuality and queer culture in general. Two high-profile examples of gender-bending include Jaden Smith, who wore a skirt in a 2016 Louis Vuitton campaign, and Billy Porter, the actor known for the musical Kinky Boots, who wore a Christian Siriano “tux ball gown” to the Oscars in 2019. As we acknowledge the complexity of gender beyond the male-female binary, unisex and more gender-fluid clothing is increasingly important. And, while there does not seem to be a large-scale adoption of skirts for men, having high-profile celebrities play with gender performance in this way is a step in the direction of more mainstream adoption. One day, Smith and Porter may be looked back at as trendsetters in the way Marlene Dietrich and Katharine Hepburn are for making pants acceptable for women.
8 – Digital Communication, Social Media, and Mediatization
p.173 – The internet was originally developed by a consortium of universities, including the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), Stanford university, the University of California, Santa Barbara and the University of Utah, along with the Advanced Research Projects Agency within the US Department of Defense. What came from these was a packet-switching network, meaning that when information was sent through this network, it would be broken down into small “packets” of information which were sent via the quickest path. The receiving computer would them reassemble the information. While the early internet would be used by government and universities during the 1960s and 1970s, it would take until 1989 for commercial networks to get onto the internet, led by CompuServe and America Online (AOL).
The early internet was somewhat different than what we’re accustomed to now, in that it was largely text-based and largely consisted of email and listservs. Even early computer operating systems were text-based and it would take until Windows 95 for the graphic interface to be widely adopted.
Eventually, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN, would help to develop the World Wide Web, which would standardize web addresses and coding language. This would allow the development of web browsers and led to the “internet” we’re accustomed to using today.
p.174 – In the 1990s there was a significant interest and growth in the internet as search engines like Yahoo, Excite and Lycos, email providers like Hotmail, and interest-driven space like the women’s site iVillage dominated. Website building and blogging also grew in importance: sites like Geocites, Tripod and Agelfire allowed users to build their own websites, while Live Journal and Xanga were dedicated to blogging platforms. While many internet firms were successful and decided to go public (i.e. sell stock), many went bankrupt in what would be know as the “dot-com bubble” in the early years of the 2000s. Some firms consolidated after the bubble burst, while other firms like Google, Yahoo, eBay, and Amazon would end up as the dominant internet sites.
However, in the 2000s there would be another revolution: social media. The simple social network site, Friendster, launched in 2002, and both LinkedIn and MySpace launched in 2003. This opened the door to the sites that still dominate the social media landscape like Facebook (originally launched for college students in 2004 and opened to everyone in 2006), YouTube (2005) and Twitter (2006). There would be other hiccups along the way such as the check-in-based Foursquare (now Swarm), the short-video-based Vine, and the anonymous geo-locator YikYak – all of which grew quickly in popularity only to fade shortly thereafter. Photo-based platforms including Pinterest (2009) Instagram (2010) and Snapchat (2011) would take off a bit later and are still in wide use as of this writing, as is TikTok (2016), the short-video-based platform.
p.175 – Many of the sites we consider “social media” started out as social network sites that allowed users to create profiles and connect and communicate with their network. However, as smartphone technology grew and these sites expanded and developed as publishing platforms, they helped build what we now call social media. Today, social media is generally understood to include social network sites and other forms of internet-based media, which allow users to connect with others, produce content (in whatever form), communicate with others and customize their profiles.
In many ways, the internet and digital communications are unlike any of the media that has come before it due to its flexibility and interactive nature.
9 – Fashion, Clothing and/as Art
p.196 – Designating something as “art” changes the way we understand it and communicate about it. Calling something art or an art confers a status on it and its related actions, thereby giving it greater cultural prominence and prestige. This status is generally given to works by cultural institutions including museums, critics and award organizations.
p.201 – Conceptual fashion has been the most useful in raising the status of fashion as an art from both inside and outside the academy. In fact, some have argued that creativity within such fashion designs – not truly intended to be “practical or utilitarian” – ultimately proves that fashion is an artform. Moreover, some of these designs have been intended to critique the fashion system of social structures as a whole. Francesca’s Granata’s work on experimental fashion argues that designers and artists like Rei Kawakubo, Leigh Bowery and even Lady Gaga have used clothing to critique normative discourses and bodily presentations. Examples like Kawakubo’s padded dresses and Leigh Bowery’s drag performances question the materiality and artifice of our personal appearances. When used in this way, clothing and appearance aim to be a more meaningful expression than the “consumable” way we generally think of clothing.
p.208 – As Julia Petrov writes, “Fashion within the museum environment takes on a heightened visuality at the expense of hapticity, due to the norms and rules surrounding the need for the preservation of objects, the physical arrangement of objects in the space, and the physical and visual relation of visitors to objects on display.”
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