Fashion and Culture

2050 Words9 Pages
Fashion and Culture Many people believe clothing is not only a necessity; their clothing represents their cultures and beliefs. Many people across the globe express themselves through the clothing that they wear not in the words that they say. Rachel Zoe articulated this, saying: “Style is the best way to say who you are, without having to speak”. This quote and our visual acuteness expresses to us that people communicate things about themselves through clothing, and at the collective level this could result in locating them symbolically in some status structure (Davis, 1992). Fashion is extremely important and ever-present in many cultures around the world. There are many theories of what shapes a culture’s fashion and what fashion’s purpose is in society, however most of these theories are debated and uncertain. Edward Sapir, an anthropologist and linguist, noted some characteristics of the fashion worlds’ ambiguity stating, “The chief difficulty of understanding fashion in its apparent vagaries is the lack of exact knowledge of the unconscious symbolisms attaching to forms, colors, textures, postures, and other expressive elements of a given culture. The difficulty is appreciably increased by the fact that some of the expressive elements tend to have quite different symbolic references in different areas [of the world]” (Davis, 1992). Being a sojourner in Italy, coming from the United States, and having previous knowledge in the fashion industry, I have noticed these obvious cultural differences in fashion. Because of fashions’ ever-changing tendencies and with my familiarity in the industry, it’s obvious that one needs to be cautious about ascribing precise meanings to clothing. An apparel agency that said one thing last year, will say something quite different today and yet another thing next year (Davis, 1992). Fred Davis, author of Fashion, Culture, and

More about Fashion and Culture

Open Document