Background
Fashion as art or art as fashion raises some interesting questions about who we are as consumers, why we buy, and the use of the concept of ‘high fashion’ as a key retail marketing strategy for some brands. Indeed, some brands will refer to themselves as being a fashion house or a couture brand rather than a retailer – the implication being that a retailer is somehow a lesser status.
Yet many couture brands such as Chanel use mass market cosmetics as their brands ‘entry level’ product. Entwistle (2009) argues that fashion belongs to the aesthetic economy, that style has become commodified. Our ideas as to what is ‘fashionable’ and who we see as fashion ‘leaders’ are packaged together successfully and sold very profitably.
Every year Anna Wintour hosts the Met Gala (Links to an external site.) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Links to an external site.) in New York. The Met Ball celebrates either a fashion designer or a particular approach to couture. The designer’s clothes are then displayed as any other museum exhibit.
Andrew Bolton, Head Curator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute clearly believes that fashion is an art form that should be celebrated as such, click on this article to read more about his ideas (Links to an external site.), and select play on the videos below to learn more about his ideas. You can also see his previous work at the V&ALinks to an external site. museum in London.
He argues that fashion is not merely functional but that it can be an art form. The Met’s exhibition of Alexander McQueen’s ‘Savage Beauty’ work was one of the most popular exhibits in the museum’s history. These fashions were objects to be desired, wondered at and admired. The museum visitor is there to wonder at the craftsmanship of these garments, to admire the creative process, to be awed at the complex construction of the garments. These garments are to be preserved so that future generations can also wonder at their creation, as we do vessels from ancient Rome.
Yet we see a juxtaposition to this. Fast Fashion as a retail strategy has been exceptionally successful for brands such as Zara and Primark. Even supermarkets such as Tesco or Walmart have clothing as a central part of the retail strategy. In the case of food retail, here the strategy is the concept of the ‘one stop shop’ where the busy customer can pick up everything that they need from socks to wine. However, in the case of fast fashion, fashion garments are not to be revered or kept for a long period of time. They are disposable, the consumer is encouraged to visit the store regularly to buy the latest fashion. Once the product is no longer ‘in fashion’ the consumer is encouraged to dispose of it, lest they themselves become no longer ‘in fashion’.
What is ‘fashionable’ is therefore something of a social construct. There is an entire industry of models, retailers, fashioner designers, magazine editors that work together with the consumer to construct our collective reality of fashion. Skinny jeans are deemed to be fashionable one year yet inappropriate the next. Fashion is temporal.
Fashion also enables ourselves to construct and display our self-identity. As Bauman (1997) notes, we can cast off and change new identities throughout our lives. For example, we may use changing fashions to present our self to the world. I am an art student at 18, working mum at 32 and stylish divorcee at 60. Indeed, using fashion, we may ‘curate’ ourselves as Andrew Bolton curates an exhibition.
Therefore, you are required to answer the question ‘is Fashion Art or is Art Fashion?’
References: Bauman, Z (1997) Postmodernity and its Discontents Polity Press: Cambridge, Bauman, Z (1997) Postmodernity and its Discontents Polity Press: Cambridge.
Guidelines
- The submission format is PowerPoint plus audio. This means your submission is intended to be viewed as a presentation and should be designed accordingly. PowerPoint is not just ‘cut-and-paste’ text from a Word doc.
- You are required to pre-record the narrative for your submission.
- Thankfully, Microsoft has made this fairly straightforward. The link below takes you to the relevant support page. Do not wait for the assignment being launched to familiarise yourselves with this functionality.
- Excluding your cover sheet slide and reference section, the maximum presentation length is 10 slides and must last approximately 10 minutes
Videos:
| Criteria | Ratings | Pts |
| Use of arguments | 10.0 pts | |
| Quality of Analysis | 10.0 pts | |
| Presentation | 10.0 pts | |
| Total points: 30.0 |
