Essay On Fashion And Identity

Fashion and identity together, give a sense of community along with personal identification, and who ‘you’ really are. A person’s overall bodily appearance, along with their choice of clothing or style, also includes their body-language, voice, mannerisms, etc. Fashion and style are a concretized representation and validation of your identity. It is a form of expression or voice that is conveying and building the consumers clothing choices. Each minor decision or feeling regarding one’s own wardrobe or clothing is in actuality a contribution to your identity. Clothing and dress should be autonomous regardless of the changing trends and styles and rather than simply conforming to them. These are the factors that reinforce the personality of an individual through the years.

The link between clothing and identity is a long established theme in dress studies, though one that has been given new impetus by the rise of postmodernism with its emphasis on identity. The link has been understood in a number of ways. The most prominent has been in terms of social class. Sociologists Veblen (1889) and Simmel (1904) have explored the way in which clothing operates as part of class identity, with fashions diffusing down the social hierarchy as they are successively adopted and abandoned by elites, and as lower groups take up the style. Competitive class emulation is thus the engine of fashion. Bourdieu (1984) states that analysis of the role of clothing serves as a class distinction marker in which, the dress serves as a cultural head, and is a part of how elites maintain, establish and produce power in society. More recently the dominance of class in the account of fashion has been challenged. The democratisation of fashion and the rise of street styles, has rendered its dynamic less central (Davis 1992, Crane 2000), with the result that other aspects of identity are increasingly