What is Fashion?

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The word ‘fashion’ has had different meanings through different historical periods, and the fashion phenomenon is very complex. Here is an interpretation of three different understandings of fashion: fashion as a socially organising logic, fashion as an aesthetic change in taste and fashion as a cultural industry.

According to the German sociologist Georg Simmel fashion is based on two human mecanisms –imitation of the group and individual differentiation respectively. At the same time he regards fashion as a product of class distinction. In Marxism fashion is an accomplice of product logic and the capitalistic production model with profits as the main goal.

The French sociologist Gilles Lipovetsky is more positive in that he regards fashion as a social logic, whose primary qualities are the rejection of tradition, the desire of the individual for renewal, democratisation, seduction, imagination and volatility.

The Canadian sociologist Stanley Lieberson decribes fashion as social aesthetics that has to do with looks. Fashion is an aesthetic change, and a product can be divided into two components: quality based on “change for aesthetic reasons” and function. If the aesthetic parts of a product begin to change more frequently, it means that fashion is becoming an increasingly central part of the product.

In a common and contemporary understanding of fashion the fashion industry has to do with clothing, models, catwalk, fashion houses, Karl Lagerfeld and ladies’ magazines. The cultural industry is based on production and consumption of human – especially female – body decoration. The British zoologist Desmond Morris belives that body art has three main functions: 

1) Display, in particular of social status.

2) Personal well-being and protection.

3) Virtuousness: sexual cover/exposure – demonstration of gender difference.

In our contemporary fashion culture there is a tension field between status on one side and youthful, female beauty on the other side.

"  Fashion is architecture: it is a matter of proportions."
Coco Chanel