to fashion skeptics:

it can be frustrating sometimes when you tell people you want to spend the rest of your life working in an industry that, let's be honest, kind of gets a bad rap (or is it wrap?)

well thanks to an assignment for my nonverbal communication class, i've actually been looking into some scholarly takes on the industry, as well as fashion as a form of self expression

i stumbled upon an excerpt from a book called ambivalence, and its relation to fashion and the body by anne boultwood and robert jerrard that i felt compelled to post!

"Both the body and fashion are independently related to self-awareness, and the nature of their joint interaction suggests a relationship between the two. Whilst the nature of such a relationship remains unclear, the literature in both fields reveals potentially common themes. Body-fashion interaction lends expression to the unconscious experience of self, both internally as part of a 'selfing' process, and externally by creating an identity to present to others. Conflicts within the psyche, played out on the body, contribute to a fragmented sense of self, and the view of fashion as exacerbating its disintegration may be contrasted with the belief in the power of fashion to integrate. The ambiguity of this internal conflict is echoed by the conflicting social-psychological needs of imitation/identification and differentiation that characterise the social experience of the body, and are manifested in the individual's response to fashion. The apparent superficiality of fashion is belied by its role in giving expression to the ambivalence derived from the internal conflict of the individual, and the external ambivalence of postmodern society. Individual ambivalence focuses on the concept of the ideal body, an image created by society for the objectified body to aspire to, and a platonic ideal that encapsulates the individual sense of embodiment. Fashion's aspirational role is to provide a means of creating an approximation of the ideal. This occurs at the body boundary, the threshold, which marks the demarcation between self, as, experienced within the body, and nonself as it impinges from without. The ambiguity of the body-clothing threshold fuels the fashion process, and it may be that body boundary represents an interface between the experience of self and its expression through fashion."


it looks kinda scary in one big clump like that, but it's worth the read.