When thinking about fashion, the first thing that comes to your mind might be clothes or models. However there is much more to fashion then a beautiful person walking down the runway. Look around you and there are inspirations everywhere. The media and pop culture are the biggest influences on fashion. Something simple, like a palm tree, can spark a spring/summer collection, or some type of trend. Everyday people wear clothes that gives off a certain impression to others. Your distress jeans may say that your feeling casual and layback. Your outfit can define who you are. It can give you an identity. The fabric, colors and style of the clothes are works of art, that combine together to create a piece of fashion. Fashion is a form of expression for both the designer and the people wearing it.
Now, don’t get us wrong. Just because we mentioned a model, a runway, designer and clothes, doesn’t mean that is what fashion is all about. Fashion is really a popular trend. Fashion is almost always related to clothes, but it isn’t limited to clothes. We have shoes, styles, hair, make up, walks, talks and more. Fashion is like an infinite category; a lot of ‘things’ can fit into it. We have fashion as an identity, the physicality of fashion, disabilities in fashion, pop culture in fashion, and fashion as an art.
Thank you guys for posting these two paragraphs. I think your aim in these two paragraphs is to start cultivating a definition of fashion that doesn’t just seem like a separate industry or a sector of people who make impractical clothing and model them in advertisements. You want to try to set up fashion as something that both informs and is informed by everyday life and everyday peoples expression of self and community. I think starting this way is a good strategy. I think it gives you a good parameters for how your texts and papers will speak together that still allows for you to have a lot of variation in your text.
I have two suggestions: 1) I think you need to keep digging at articulating what it is you see fashion as. You say it’s not just clothing and it includes any trend, but that idea is vague. Also I’m not sure that you’re interested in pitting a new way of looking at fashion against fashion as clothes. I think as I said before you’re trying to set up a tension between fashion as a kind of elite culture set apart and inclusive to fashion as a kind of cultural force that animates all of our lives. You need to be clearer about this idea.
2) A little relatedly, I see how you’re starting to gesture to the types of text you will have in your second paragraph. I think you’re moving too fast. I need you to spend more time elaborating number one. Then I need you to kind of help me understand what the stakes are of such a way of looking at fashion. Why does it matter if I think about fashion as an elite culture that most people are not a part of and if I think of fashion as an everyday force in people’s lives? Then you can also take your time in kind of articulating your own position within this tension. You’ll have the rest of the introduction to tell me how all those texts fit with this tension and your central claim.
(Also it might help you all to consult an anthropological text on fashion. you might look something up in JSTOR. You might try the introduction to Ted Polhemus and Lynn Procter’s (1978 book) Fashion and Anti-fashion: An Anthropology of Clothing and Adornment. I got this reference from Wikipedia, but it might help.)