Fashion is a means of communication. What you decide to wear sends a non-verbal message to others. Therefore, fashion conveys not only its aesthetics but also the wearer’s values and personality.
Fashion stimulates strategic communication whereby it sends a message to the audience wanting to act or think subject to what the wearer wants. This means that it is easy to influence an audience with fashion. How people interact with each other and the world at large is what shapes different cultures.
Therefore, there’s a relationship between fashion, communication, and culture. Read on.
Fashion, Clothing, and Communication
Fashion and clothing do not need the wearer to speak verbally, but they send silent messages to the world. Others would define communication as to how someone says something to someone else in one or more media to get a similar or different result.
Therefore, the medium is the cloth used by one person to send a specific message to someone else, meaning the cloth carries the message from the wearer to the other party. However, it is not evident who sends the message through the dress; the wearer or the designer?
Fashion Clothing and Culture
Usually, fashion is a statement of culture. Therefore, clothes separate cultures in the society, with each culture owning a clothing style.
When you choose to wear your culture’s fashion, people will automatically relate with you if they are from the same culture. For instance, in Kenya’s Maasai community, wearing beads will make it easy for people to identify their culture through their fashion.
People communicate society’s beliefs, values, and skills through practices, objects, and institutions. Therefore, in this case, the experiences, artifacts, and societies are fashion and clothing.
Fashion, Clothing, and Philosophy
Fashion and clothing are like walls, fences, and bridges that distinguish different groups in society. Fences and bridges mean fences keep groups apart while bridges bring people together to a common ground. While separation happens, shared values and practices are identified within a group.
Sometimes, people wear clothes innocently, but people’s messages are not as innocent because of their roles and social and cultural.
Fashion and clothing are also like weapons and defenses. This means that the parties involved challenge or try to maintain their positions of supremacy and dominance. When different groups use fashion and clothing as their weapons and defenses, they create an actual social order.
This way, certain groups share their ideologies against what other groups have. It also means that the weapons and defenses enable meaningful class relations and class differences. Apart from being linked to communication and culture, fashion and clothing through ideologies maintain, establish, and recreate power positions for different groups.
Fashion, clothing, and culture are methods of communicating a specific group’s identity in a non-verbal way that produces and exchanges meanings and values. It is also clear that most people are clueless about the ideological and cultural impact of their style of fashion and clothing.
So, what does your style say about you?
