MATERIALS
What is fast fashion?
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‘Fast fashion’ is a term used to describe a new accelerated fashion business model that has evolved since the 1980s. It involves increased numbers of new fashion collections every year, quick turnarounds and often lower prices. Reacting rapidly to offer new products to meet consumer demand is crucial to this business model.
Fashion, to most people, is an ephemeral expression of culture, art, and technology manifesting itself in form. But fashion is also a verb: to fashion is to make.
Fashion is the interface between who we are, and how we want people to perceive us. Charles Horton Cooley famously said, “I am not what I think I am, I am not what you think I am, I am what I think you think I am”. That’s the principle behind his Theory of The Looking Glass Self.
Effectively, new clothing is like that magic mirror. It shows us a reflection of ourselves in which our utmost desires have taken shape. We put on these shiny new garments and see ourselves as worthy, confident, and powerful. And these garments, worthless on a hanger, breathe confidence, personality, and self-worth into the subconscious mind of the wearer.
Clothing is primarily a means of communicating social identity instead of personal identity. Clothing is thus a symbol of social identity and the values espoused by the group and serve as a premise for judging the clothing worn by others and the social identity symbolised by it. Wearing unbranded products is a threat to social identity.
Self-expression rarely takes place without consumption. It was Edward Bernays, godfather of the term ‘public relations’, who uncovered the idea that by linking products to our feelings and desires, rather than our intellect or rational needs, we could turn emotion into capitalism.
Consumption has a two-fold nature in identity expression. Products can be seen as the ‘outer skin’ of identity which consumers attain to express the ‘inner self’.
Goods have no function of value without their symbolic function (Holt, 2002) given the process of consumption is now both the consumption of real and the imaginary. The consumer thus becomes a consumer of illusions buying images and not things.
By 2030 global apparel fashion consumption is projected to rise by 63%, from 62 million tons today to 102 million tons—equivalent to more than 500 billion additional T-shirts.
Consumption has become central to our postmodern society where goods are now consumed for their symbolic qualities. Consumption of fashion can be seen as an individual act, where individuals are provided constant possibilities to improve and express themselves through fashion, but also as a social act, where membership or distance to other cultural groups is confirmed.
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In our postmodern consumer culture, the process of consumption is both real and imaginary.
Today’s postmodern culture is embedded with consumption. Consumption has become the source of happiness (Firat & Dholakia, 1998) and a central focal point of human existence (Sumich, 2005). The term consumer culture builds to the understanding that goods are central to our contemporary society.
Changing the agency of fashion from commoditized to dematerialized
through virtual, speculative imagining can contribute theoretically to shifting the focus of consumption from objects to a currency of ideas and innovation.
The term post-photography might have become a welcome means to help us liberate the medium from the agony of a nameless void.
The possibilities of structure and surface in a physical–digital space are mutable, no longer fixed or static. This research considers possible transformations by imagining fashion as something other than
object, opening up a fluid enquiry in which matter unbound can become transformed, ephemeral,
dematerialized.
Batchen argued that instead of giving access to reality, photography was beginning to provide merely a vocabulary of conventions. The ‘post-photography’ term’s strength might be precisely that it is open for discursive appropriations from all sides.
In the current tendency to oppose photography to digital imagery we are actually witnessing a continuation of an old debate about photography. This is the debate between those who have stressed the photographic image's privileged status as a trustworthy mechanical analogue of reality and those who have stressed its constructed, artificial and ideological character.
Given the abundance of pre-existing visual material in our hyper-documented world, it’s unsurprising that an increasing amount of photographic art begins with someone else’s pictures. There’s nothing new about appropriating found imagery for fine-art purposes. But the sources, methods, and goals are fast-evolving. If digital culture has transformed photographic practice — that is, how pictures are taken and displayed — it has had no less profound an impact on how found materials are sought and then manipulated.
"Whatever it grants to vision and whatever its manner, a photograph is always invisible: it is not it that we see."
The photograph's frame heretofore simply a container for the image, can store now store of a verity of hidden information that can help to contextualize and amplify the image's meanings accessible to the interested reader. (...) Much of digital photography will not be as it is now, reactive but will try to anticipate and deal with potential issues rather than waiting for them to happen and recording their existence.
In an image based economy, fashion images have an imperious scope: they are enlisted to produce desire, encourage commodity consumption, entertain, educate, dramatise experience, document events in time, celebrate identity, inform and misinform, offer evidence. Change, then, in how such artifacts are produced, consumed, and understood, is a matter of some historical moment.
Reference list:
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Camera Lucida, R. Barthes, (1997).
Consumption in the Digital Age, B. Seier, (2019).https://www.fashionrevolution.org/consumption-in-the-digital-age/
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Fashion brands and consumption in postmodern consumer culture, The construction of self and social identities, S Hokkanen, (2014).
https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1309958/FULLTEXT01.pdf
Fashion is A Verb, W. McDonough, (2015).
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Fixing fashion: clothing consumption and sustainability, Environmental Audit Committee, (2019).
https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201719/cmselect/cmenvaud/1952/full-report.html#content
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How to change the world by fashion consumption, J. Strähle, (2016).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=We6tLMR5wx8&feature=emb_rel_pause
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How to Engage with Ethical Fashion, C. Vuletich, (2016).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXOd4qh3JKk&feature=emb_rel_pause
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Imagining and imaging future fashion, M. Smitheram, (2015).
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/282908641_Imagining_and_imaging_future_fashion
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Introductory Essay in The Photographic Image in Digital Culture, M. Lister, (2001).
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Post-Photography: The Artist with a Camera, R. Shore, (2014
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Post-Photography: What’s in a Name?, W. Brückle and M. de Mutiis, (2020).
https://photography-in-switzerland.ch/essays/post-photography-whats-in-a-name
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The Man with the Movie Camera, D. Vertov, (1929).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XoMT194SUvE
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What is Fashion for?, Clare Press in conversation with Paul Dillinger, (2020).
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