Fashion Social Class

Fashion is considered as a popular style or the latest trend including clothes, accessories and makeup. However, although fashion could be perceived in many visual items such as clothes, there are many invisible factors included in fashion(Kawamura, 2005). Furthermore, some valuable messages such as social class, gender and personal identity that belong to invisible factors are contained in fashion. This essay is going to focus on social class, gender and individuality revealed by fashion, and indicates why emerge these revelation. The essay is divided into four main sections. It will first focus on social class is revealed by fashion and discuss why this happens. It will then consider that fashion can reflect gender and then analyse the reasons.

The European fashion had the enormous differences between the middle classes, higher classes and lower classes in the nineteenth century, which was mainly reflected in some elements of clothing, such as shape, fabric, color, decoration and accessorizing (Aspelund, 2009). However, in recent years, the association of social class and fashion are less significant than before, which especially reacts on the luxury market. One of the first people, Thorsten Veblen, who studied the relationship between luxury and social class claimed that it was a key feature to distinguish the upper social classes and lower social classes by the price of luxury goods(Walley and Li, 2013), but this situation has changed. For example, the situation of the luxury market in China. According to Walley (2013), this market in China contains two groups that are the super rich and the affluent middle-class. This means the consumers of luxury products are not only the upper-class but also the middle-class. Furthermore, this market is expanding and is not a complete symbol of upper class. Today, when a person wears a piece of clothing in luxury brand or luxury bag, it does not mean this person is upper-class, but before the last century, people could easily perceive who are upper-class from their

There is a example in China, numerous national fashion organizations will imitate fashion products that are designed and produced by international famous companies, which causes many people who are lower class could purchase fashionable goods. However, in the nineteenth century, fashionable styles were only designed and produced for the upper-class (Crane,2000). Especially, the online fashion organizations, as one type of fashion business, are rapidly developing in several years (Petkova, 2016). With fiercer competition, those fashion organizations need to promote fashion goods for attracting global consumers, which gives consumers more choices. People can choose the various types of clothing they preferred, rather than comply with their social classes.

The second reason is that the development of the world economy, so the difference between higher-class and lower-class in the economy has decreased, gradually. Because of this, the difference in spending money on fashion goods between higher-class and lower-class has decreased. Moreover, the current middle-class also could afford to purchase some expensive goods such as luxury products than