CULTURAL STUDIES

Fashion and Sub Culture Groups



Fashion and Sub Culture Groups

Introduction

The term fashionable refers to behavior adopted and uniformly by groups of people in a certain time and a field of action. Such behavior characterized by its broad diffusion within the group, which is also explicitly aware of its transitory nature: what is in fashion bound soon to go out of fashion. Fashion concerns not only the clothing of the body but also the consumption of objects (e.g., furniture) and ideas. The term used to denote behaviours and preferences in different areas of action, thought, and moral belief, as well as in music, art, leisure, science, religion, or politics.

More specifically, the term fashion is today normally used to refer to the modern custom of dressing in accordance with norms laid down by fashion designers and by clothes manufacturing firms and that disseminated through a system of specialized media such as fashion shows and magazines. As Yuniya Kawamura argues in her book Fashionology (2005), fashion can be considered a particular social institution, with its own norms and organizations. This is the topic addressed here.

Fashion and the Sub Culture Groups

Some scholars maintain that fashion, as a form of regulation of collective behavior, is characteristic of all human cultures. Jennifer Craik in her book The Face of Fashion (1994), for example, argues that the fashion impulse exists in all cultures and embodies the achievement of distinctiveness in dress through clothing codes and symbols, whose aim is to express belonging to a group and at the same time the individual's desire to assert his or her personality. The predominant view, however, is that there is a strict connection between fashion as we know it today and the modern world, and that fashion as an institution has been essentially Eurocentric and capitalist.

Numerous researchers date the birth of the first fashionable behavior to the second half the fourteenth century, when it was concomitant with the rapid growth of trade and economic enterprises in many parts of Europe. That period, in fact, saw radical change in the relationship between the individual and society. There arose the idea that value does not always reside in the immutability of social structures inherited from the past, because the individual personality—autonomous and responsible for its own choices—can have value in itself.

To be appreciated, therefore, was the capacity to design and to direct one's own life, that is, the capacity to differentiate oneself from others by making autonomous choices. The appearance of the first short-lived fashions in the princely courts of the fourteenth century expressed the need, to represent this new value attributed to the individual's autonomy through the manner in which the body clothed.

Thereafter, fashion developed as individuality became progressively valorised in the social structure, the more that society became flexible. In societies where the social structure was rigid and where individuals had almost no chance of changing their social position, there was neither the requirement nor the need to express one's belonging and identity through ...