Essay On Fashion And Irrationality

Defying fashion can be as difficult and ambiguous as an attempt to defy art and sex. What is fashion? What can be defined as fashion? and what is the purpose of it. The definition of fashion has always fascinated many fashion writers and many have attempt to conceptualise it. In this essay, I will focus on the principles of fashion by looking into its history and trends to try and understand how it is defined and what purpose does it serve. In addition to this, I will look more closely into fashion and its relationship between sexuality and eroticism and how extreme fashion trends have affected us as consumers.

Those who have investigated fashion will find themselves stuck in its irrationality. Some tried to explain their functional terms

The first few trends was during the Roman Empire and it was to do more with hairstyles, wigs and cosmetics rather than garments. Between the fifth and the eleventh centuries AD, men and women dressed in loose robes as influenced by Christianity. Dresses are also used as a medium to distinguish classes. Working class wore wool with rough materials and less ornaments. The style of dress began to change in the twelfth century as women’s dresses are tighter to the shapes. It wasn’t until the revolutionary Christian Dior’s ‘New Look’ in 1947 that marked a new page in the fashion history. The timing also made it significant since it was 2 years after the World War 2 in which most fashion editors were already convinced that fashion was heading for a dead end. After the launch of the New Look, the public began to take more interest once again.
“I was conscious of an electric tension that I had never before felt in the couture. (…) The first girl came out, stepping fast, switching with a provocative swinging movement, whirling in the close-packed room, knocking over ashtrays with the strong flare of her pleated skirt, and bringing everyone to the edge of their seats…After a few more costumes had passed, all at the same exciting tempo, the audience knew Dior had created a new look…We were witness to a revolution in fashion…” Bettina Ballard, American Vogue’s Paris respond to the New

It’s a theory of the shifting erogenous zone which claims that “at any period one portion of the female body must be emphasised, but that this emphasis must continuously shift since otherwise men will become satiated.” This theory was used to explain particularly ‘irrational’ fashions such as the bare back dresses of the 1930s; he argued that the back was eroticised because men were no longer turned on by legs, which had been over-exposed in the 1920s, although in fact low backed dresses were also seen then. J.c. Flugel took the theory further as he attempted to explain the relationship of sex to dress as something psychoanalytic. He argued that, “Fashion is a self-renewing compromise between modesty and eroticism; overt sexuality has been necessarily largely repressed in ‘civilized’ society, and it must therefore express itself in furtive or oblique ways, always fighting the ‘reaction formation’ of modesty and