Group Work

so this is my first blog for the year, (oops) but it needs to be done.

our quote, as group (ty, keegan, amy, megan and me) was this:


In his essay ‘Fashion’ (1904), Simmel pinpoints the role of fashionable dress as a means to negotiate the tensions between fitting in with the crowd, and expressing a distinctive, sense of individuality. He states:

"Fashion is the imitation of a given example and satisfies the demand for social adaption...at the same time it satisfies in no less degree the need of differentiation, the tendency towards dissimilarity, the desire for constant change and contrast." P 71

after breaking it down in my own head, i realised it had a lot to do with our learning in social and cultural studies 1. The quote is basically asking why do we desire so much to be individual, and thus be identified as being different by how we dress/style ourselves, yet seem to hold back so that we are not too different so as to not 'fit in' to society and be accepted and not outcasted by how we dress.

in researching this, i looked at the idea of subcultures (ie punks or emos) and how collectively the 'subculture' dresses the same, but each member of the group tries to style themselves slightly different to everyone else, so in a sense this is being different but within a closed context, making sure one still has the security of other people dressing the same, but can still explore new looks (uniformed to that subculture, of course)

i also looked into a fashion trend in the UK called 'double dressing' (which we also briefly touched on in 1st yr). explores the idea of two (usually best) friends wearing exaclty the same clothes, but styling the outfits differently. I guess the point of this is to allow both to dress as crazy as each other, but have the comfort of knowing that someone else is in the same outfit. so youre not really dressing as a complete individual but more so than say a social clique (aka group of friends) all dressing in the same way.

As a group, we also nutted out the idea of outrageous dress (punk movement anyone? vivienne westwood, malcom mclaren) was a symbol of rebellion. So perhaps today, because we have so little boundaries, we are all dressing quite conservatively because we have nothing to revolt against. perhaps when we as a modern society need to break free of the social norms/technology age we will see a drastic change in our dress (like the arts and crafts movement to combat the lack of personal touch brought along with the industrial revolution).

I found a quote in Fashion Now by Vivienne Westwood which I felt summed up my take on our quote...

"Its difficult to be avant garde today. People have got used to everything"

note to self.... never drink on a thursday night. ever