How is Today's Fashion Brands Relate to Social Identities?

How is Today's Fashion Brands Relate to Social Identities?

Introduction

Chrlotta Kratz has defined the term fashion in her piece of work “Fashion in the face of postmodernity”, as “fashion is a cultural phenomenon. It is concerned with meanings, and with communication.” (p194)

The historical accounts of fashion brands describe a market in transition. In the mid-nineteenth century up to the years following World War II, women's fashions were dominated by a system of haute couture. Key manufacturers and designers such as the House of Chanel or Dior were part of a centralized and hierarchical structure in women's fashions (Rosaldo, 2006). Styles were relatively homogeneous and changed little from year to year. The designs were initially aimed at an upper-class clientele, but were widely sold to others. In the United States, manufacturers copied elite fashions and sold them at different prices to women varying in income; this practice, in (Flugel, 2007) view, allowed upper-class styles to trickle down to middle- and working-class women—in much the way (Entwistle, 2008) predicted.

By the 1970s, the haute couture system diminished in importance. (Craik, 2006) described new, emergent fashions as democratized, polymorphous, and pluralistic. In the haute couture model, fashion brands diffused from the top down but, according to (Arnold, 2008), fashions began to diffuse from the bottom up—with designers increasingly attuned to diverse subcultures, including minorities, the young, and the working class. As important as the fragmentation of fashion brands was the speed at which fashions changed. In the haute couture system, styles changed infrequently. In the more pluralistic system, fashions changed more rapidly, as much as five to six times a year or more (Rosaldo, 2006).

Discussion

This history is instructive. Fashion brands products diversified in two ways: first, by becoming more heterogeneous and fragmented—catering to a wider range of tastes and interests; second, by accelerating the pace of change—moving styles in and out of vogue several or more times a year. Why this explosion in product diversity, in the demand for new products and symbols? Many of the explanations offered draw on the very same ideas used in discussions of identity—the increase in heterogeneity and complexity in contemporary societies.

According to (Flugel, 2007), new demands emerge in concert with the “fragmentation of contemporary societies” and “the greater complexity of relationships between social groups” (p. 166). (Entwistle, 2008) ties fashion brands change to ambivalence about the self that a “more complex and heterogeneous society” accentuates (p. 24). Other researchers attribute recent fashion brands change to postmodernity and the breakdown of uniform cultural codes (Craik, 2006).

Conrad Lodziak in his book, “The myth of consumerism”, has discussed the concept of fashion as: “our identity is made up by our consumption of goods- and their consumption and display constitutes our expression of taste.” (p48)

Popular as these explanations may be, they are not entirely satisfying on all accounts. In the first place, more standardized, less diverse fashions are not necessarily incompatible with the differentiation or individualized identities that consumers ...