What is Fashion?
What is Fashion?
“We live not according to reason, but to fashion” - Seneca
“There’s never a new fashion but it’s old” - Geoffrey Chaucer
Fashion is a business. It’s a format to create trends which, as Oscar Wilde so wonderfully put it, “Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months”. These constant changing trends are how the fashion houses and brands of the world continue to make money. So, it’s no wonder that it is they, themselves, that drive this constant change in trends which makes fashion as a business so hugely successful.
But, it’s not just clothes and products that these fashion companies sell. They sell a lifestyle. They sell a way of expressing ourselves. They sell a feeling. They sell a status.
We choose to buy into dreams of desirability that brands like Saint Laurent, Louis Vuitton, Chanel and Dior sell.
Fashion is personal expression. It’s an art that is practised every day by every one of us each time we stand in front of our closets and construct and design an outfit for the day. It’s a way of expressing our personalities, who we are or, who we want to be.
Fashion is our ability to feel comfortable with ourselves and our personal styles, but is also a way for us to show what we want other people to believe about us.
If we are each the star of our own show, fashion is our costume that develops with our story lines and character arcs. For some of us, this development is steady, changing slowly scene by scene. For others, we suddenly find ourselves and our personal style during a short interval and we are completely different for the second act.
Some people believe that fashion is just about designers, but every single one of us is capable of creating our own fashion.
So, what’s the difference between fashion and style? These two terms are often used interchangeably, but I want to refer to two legends of the fashion industry who, I feel, summed both up perfectly.
“Fashions fade, style is eternal” - Yves Saint Laurent
"Fashion you can buy, but style you possess. The key to style is learning who you are, which takes years. There's no how-to road map to style. It's about self expression and, above all, attitude.” - Iris Apfel
Fashion, therefore, could be argued to be defined by its materials, colours and proportions, with style being how the individual chooses to wear those materials, colours and proportions.
For me, style is extremely personal and can only be defined by the individual.
For years, I fell victim to fashion trends and felt the need to constantly buy new pieces from fast fashion brands in order to keep up. If I could pinpoint the moment I started to hone in on my personal style, choose quality, timeless pieces over what was “in right now”, it was late 2019, with most of my development actually only happening in the second half of 2021.
Fuelled by the emotions of a breakup (and a couple of other things!), I turned to fashion to help me cope. I used fashion to help me present a version of myself to the world that I was trying to be, and a version that I was trying to prove to myself that I was: a strong woman with her shit together.
Through this persona, I designed a wardrobe that in the end, was more me than any selection of clothes I’d owned in the past.
This was my second-act style. It’s what I love to wear, what I feel most confident in and what, on most days, inspires and motivates me to work hard to achieve more of the life I want to live. It’s something that I’m constantly working at to develop and will always strive to perfect.
For me, that’s what fashion is.