The Importance Of Fashion Communication

Before understanding Fashion Communication as a whole, it is very important to understand the connection between the concepts of fashion, culture and communication. Fashion blogger Mathide Jansson talks about it in detail on her blog on the website fashionmedium.blogspot.in. She also explains the theory given by the famous visualist Malcolm Barnard.

Acording to Jansson it is important to understand that clothes and fashion are also the unconventional means of communication. One needs to understand the importance of the statement made by clothing and are the kinds of communication is involved. Fashion and clothes are a phenomenon Barnard says; “And it will argue that clothing and fashion, as communication, are cultural phenomena in that culture

Jansson further tries to explain his theory that there are two main schools in the study of communication, both relate to a general definition of communication as ‘social interaction through messages’ but they each understand that definition slightly differently. The first school is called the ‘process’ school, where it is believed that “communication is conceived as a process in which someone says something to someone else in one or other medium or channel with some or other effect.” Where in this case, the garment would be the medium used by one person to send a message to another person, consequently it is the garment who carries the message the wearer wants to communicate. Although Malcolm argues that this school rises a problem as to who sends the message, if it is the wearer or if it is originally the designer. The second school, called the ‘semiotic’ or ‘structuralist’ school, says that communication as ‘social interactions through messages’ constitutes an individual as a member of a group. Rather than a member of a group communicating with other members of the group, as the first group applies.

He argues that the semiotic model is much better since it avoids the problem who creates the message since the message is created by the group as a whole. It is the social interacting, by means of the clothing, that produces

According to Douglas and Isherwood (1979) fashion and clothing can be used to bring two cultures and societies together. This argues that individual garments may be innocent , but how they are used and the functions they fulfil are not. The uses and functions of garments are social and cultural but not innocent.He tries to explain that fashion and clothing acts as a fence and bridge both. It can remove the barrier between culture and societies by being a bridge and it can also act as a fence by separating two societies and