What is Fashion?

For centuries individuals or societies have used clothes and other body adornment as a form of nonverbal communication to indicate occupation, rank, gender, sexual availability, locality, class, wealth and group affiliation. Fashion is a form of free speech. It not only embraces clothing, but also accessories, jewelry, hairstyles, beauty and body art. What we wear and how and when we wear it, provides others with shorthand to subtly read the surface of a social situation.

Fashion is also a language of signs, symbols and iconography that non-verbally communicate meanings about individuals and groups. Fashion in all its forms from tattoos and body piercing, to the newest hairstyle, is the best form of iconography we have to express individual identity. It enables us to make ourselves understood with rapid comprehension by the onlooker. How we perceive the beauty or ugliness of our bodies is dependent on cultural attitudes to physiognomy. The accepted beautiful female form that Rubens painted is subliminally undesirable nowadays, if we are to be thought beautiful in a way that the majority accepts in the 21st century. We now look to fashion magazines, fashion designers, fashion models, celebrities and even clothing shop windows to give us an idea of what the fashion trend is and how we should look.

Today an inability to refashion and reshape our bodies constantly monitoring the cultural ideal leaves us failing the fashion test. Those that pass the fashion test invariably spend their lives absorbed in a circle of diet, exercise, cosmetic surgery and other regimes. This includes always shopping in search of the ultimate garb.

Our reluctance to give ourselves a regular makeover through diet, exercise, and consistently conscious use of specific dress styles infers that we have the personality flaws of a weak willed human. We become in the eyes of fashion aficionados somewhat inadequate and imperfect in the fashion stakes. Thus we strive to keep a culturally satisfying appearance so that we feel better, whereas in fact we are striving to stay in the group, whatever type of group that may be.

Group affiliation is our prime concern with regard to fashion. As long as some group similarity is identified within the group, our personal fashion whether current or dated can belong. It is the sense of belonging marked by how we fashion ourselves that gives us that group connection.

The 3 rules of fashion;

First - a fashion is approved by others.

Then - it is copied because of competition.

Finally - it is replaced as it becomes commonplace and has ceased to fulfill its function of being distinctive.

Fashion Fact Currently in the United States fashion is a huge industry with well over 970,000 employees and with an annual turnover of 36 billion.

By Yolanda Boyle

http://www.buzzle.com