The way we dress
The way we dress shows our personality or how we are. Everybody has a different way of dressing. Introverts are said to dress casually to avoid any special attention. In contrast, extroverts wear intending to look different from the world and a way that adds a specific character to their charisma. Dressing well helps one gain self-confidence, which is an essential communication aspect. Communications skills can be acquired easily when one choose their clothes wisely. Clothing formality influences how people see someone, how people understand themselves, and also decision making. Clothing symbols reflect what a specific society believes to be valued based on the time. However, clothing does not imply someone’s rights, obligations, and thus it should not be a determinant of one’s behavior. It is advisable to dress for the job you rather than the one you have because according to studies, how you wear your clothes can affect one’s physical and mental performance. This essay will examine our cultural fashion.
Fashion is just a permanent changing trend. Style is a broad concept narrowed to accessories and fabric in modern days. People always describe style with what they put on (Kawamura, 2018). Philosophers have different fashion definitions, but they all narrow to one concept: looking good and feeling good. When someone is fashionable, they are confident of their looks and sure to be conveying the correct impression to people. Being fashionable helps people in taking the initial step towards their goals. Fashion has a history of errors such that what was viewed as stylish some decades ago might be a killer of fashion today. On the contrary, what is fashionable now might have been a fashion suicide decades back. The beliefs of people living in a specific era and their culture play a determinant role in affecting fashion trends. Designers make clothes and accessories depending on the culture of a particular region, and it is considered the region’s fashion. People only adopt a clothing trend if it accepts the culture of a place. For example, Ancient Egyptian fashion was manipulated by its ancient times’ culture. People only wore glamorous clothes which they found comfortable despite the hot climate. Due to this, they mostly preferred white color. Children and workers remained naked most of the time because only the rich wore maximum clothes.
Western outfits might have taken the world’s fashion market over by storm, but states and countries still try to stay connected to their traditional dressing style. People introduce new fashion trends in ways that they make and wear their outfit culturally (Lopes et al., 2019). Bhutanese are expected to wear traditional costumes, and so their fashion designers avoid introducing designs that interfere with the old culture in their country. Fashion changes all the time, and most of the time, even the ugliest trends become popular in a particular region. In the 1940s, shoulder pads got popular for women and vanished for a while and were back to popular in the 1980s, which was the period of the big shoulders, hairs, and jewelry even though they looked unsuitable on women. Culture changes with the change of time in particular regions, and this influences fashion trends. In India, women would wear Sari compulsorily after marriage because they were expected to stay home while their husbands went to work. Now that women contribute to the family’s income, they are not restricted from putting on a Sari anymore. Generally, people pick fashion trends mostly from the media. People try to copy their best actors and models in their dressing styles. Also, people copy their friends’ style and strain to keep up with their styles as well, and that’s how a trend becomes popular in a specific region. Even if something looks good but an outcast, it is not worn, but whatever a culture accepts becomes a region’s fashion. We can say that the culture has a considerable part to play when deciding a particular region’s fashion. A society fashion trend is a mirror to its perception as it changes with a change in culture. Fashion can affect culture also, but mostly it happens the other way.
Fashion’s inspiration is from social movements and cultural ones. Pop culture is defined as the contemporary popular culture transmitted through mass media, which is mainly aimed at younger people. Pop culture was introduced in the ’50s in New York and London. It was a rebellious fashion for younger people but later transformed into a worldwide phenomenon. A while ago, influences on fashion were different designs from racial communities and subcultures. Pop culture destroyed the traditional categories, and fashion concepts are from the ancient era. Fashion sense has developed with time in societies, and designers adapt to the new environments where it is marketed(Angelidou,2020). Fashion spreads with worldwide pop culture, but fashion’s development happens in different places, and it goes hand in hand with pop culture. Pop art and pop culture include the worldly living styles that introduce expression of the mass culture. The pop culture elements are inserted when one’s interests are based on a preference of hip-hop, reggae, or rap music. The Hollywood celebrity system ranked the highest impact on popular fashions because designers designed actresses’ clothing exclusively, creating inspiring and unique looks. Nowadays, media exposure ensures that choices on actors’ fashion are in the mainstream of pop culture. Performances from musicians like Michael Jackson and Madonna engage fashion and make clothing the main feature of their personae.
Cultural fashion, especially traditional clothing, all around the world, inspires, connects, and bring people together. The fashion industry in the world is becoming globalized daily, and it frequently draws from differing cultures. Fashion borrows from others for the better while in other times it acquires for the worst; when cultures are appropriated with no honor. There is traditional clothing that is worn every day by people worldwide, mostly on cultural occasions (Sresnewsky et al., 2020). Examples are Headwraps, which are, at times, a cultural fashion choice and other times worn for religious reasons. Headwrap wearing was initialized in the 13th century in the Assyrian empire, and now it is a modern-day North Africa and Middle East places where women used to wear veils. In Yoruba Nigeria, headwraps to women was a symbol of wealth. In most African cultures, head wraps are traditional for women. Men wear turbans and bandanas as headcloths too, where turbans are explicitly worn for religious reasons. Religiously it symbolizes the equality of status amongst religious followers. In south Asia, turbans were dressed by the society elites from the 15th century to the 18th century. Covering the head for men, signifies respect and humility. Draped clothing and those with stitched garments are common in India and Africa, Kenya, respectively. In India, draped cloths are typical because they adapt quickly to different weather. The traditional African wear is a Kanga where designers get inspiration from mainstream lines with unique looks. Ruffles and Flounces are common in traditional Mexican dances and for Spanish occupations. Tassels are now common in all cultural garbs and interior design. Oa Dai is a traditional Vietnamese dress worn by both genders, but now they are worn by women. The Chinese cheongsam has a high collar, and it is more fitting compared to Ao dai.
Works cited
Kawamura, Yuniya. Fashion-ology: an introduction to fashion studies. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2018.
Lopes Maria Vieira. “The discourse of fashion change: Trend forecasting in the fashion industry.” Fashion, Style & Popular Culture 6.3 (2019): 333-349.
Sresnewsky, Katherine Braun Galvão Bueno, et al. “Rapport-building in luxury fashion retail: a collectivist culture case.” Journal of Fashion Marketing and Management: An International Journal (2020).
Angelidou, Anastasia. “Pop art evolution and its impact on fashion and product design” (2020).