Internet, Society and Fashion

The time for predicting whether social media applications will become indispensable to people in their everyday lives is over, because that time has arrived. In the United States, Facebook usage now surpasses Google, accounting for 25 percent of all pages views and 10 percent of all internet activity (Dougherty 2010). One quarter of total online time is spent on social media, with social media usage increasing 82 percent between December 2008 and December 2009 (Nielsen Wire 2010).

Facebook is not the only social media application enjoying a phenomenal surge in usage. Thirty-five hours of video are uploaded to www.youtube.com every minute (Schmidt 2010). As of May 2011, yelp.com receives 50 million unique daily visitors (Kincaid 2011). And as early as 2006, one in three South Koreans was a member of the Korean social networking site cyworld.com (BBC News 2006). As social media continues to evolve and become even more ubiquitous, and as usergenerated content replaces marketer-generated content, researchers are beginning to examine how social media is likely to shape consumer behavior. For example, who is influencing whom in social media? How do online reviews, and information about friends’ buying behavior, influence consumers’ attitudes and purchase behavior? How do people decide what content to create (e.g., what goes in a Facebook profile, and how do users decide what to Tweet about?)

What content is most likely to go viral? More generally, why do people use social media at all and become customers of social media applications? Of course, the ubiquity and scope of social media usage make such investigations daunting. Research on specific topics in how social media impacts consumer behavior has begun to proliferate in the past several years, but organizing and drawing conclusions from this work present significant challenges. Since social media applications themselves are just coming out of a nascent stage, theoretical frameworks guiding broad research questions are still scarce. That is, while many specific topics have been covered, drawing generalizations can be difficult.

Virtual worlds in their graphical forms have been used since the mid-1980s (Yakal 1986, p. 32), primarily for social networking. They are computer-generated environments in which participants adopt an avatar to interact with each other and with the virtual environment around them. The word “avatar” in this sense means “a graphical representation of a user within the environment which is under his or her direct control” (Allbeck and Badler 2002, p. 313). It is derived from the Sanskrit avatârah, a compound of ava, (“down”), and tarati, (“he crosses”).

It means therefore “the crossing down” and traditionally refers to the incarnation of a deity within the physical world (Isdale et al. 2002, p. 530). Taking on the form of an avatar within a virtual world is thus a literacy of crossing down from the real into the digital. The word has been used in this context since it was employed by Farmer and Morningstar in an immersive virtual world called Habitat in 1985 (Britt 2008), the first platform that enabled tens of thousands of users to participate in creating aspects of the environment around them, chat with other users, play games and engage in governance of their emerging community.

From its earliest beginnings, the Internet was envisioned as a mass communications tool capable of keeping people connected and providing a platform for the sharing of information. Our needs and desires for more robust means of interaction spurred technological innovations that continue unabated. Even as we marvel at the proliferation of online social communities over the past few decades, and the recent prominence of virtual worlds, with increased abilities to replicate social and sensory cues, even more immersive possibilities are already visible on the horizon. Augmented reality technologies, which overlay digital images onto physical life spaces and were once only in the imaginations of science fiction writers, will be able to project the real-time digital images of people from distant locations into a physical world common space. In essence, we become the avatars. It will be interesting to discover the psychological implications of easily placing one’s self, fully representative, into a new environment of one’s choosing and how marginalisation effects are demonstrated to be a matter of environment.

Community, then, is the product of work, of struggle; it is inherently unstable, contextual; it has to be constantly reevaluated in relation to critical political priorities; and it is the product of interpretation, interpretation based on an attention to history (Martin and Mohanty 210).

Home. For many people on the margins, is, to paraphrase Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, that which we cannot not want. It stands for a safe place, where there is no need to explain oneself to outsiders; it stands for community; more problematically, it can elicit a nostalgia for a past golden age that never was, a nostalgia that elides exclusion, power relations, and difference.

Motifs of home animate works by peoples in diaspora, often peoples of color, who may have no permanent home, people on the margins such as gays and lesbians, for whom home was rarely if ever safe, and women and children, where the “haven” of home can be a site of violence and oppression. Martin and Mohanty focus on the narrative production of home and identity by white Southern lesbian writer Minnie Bruce Pratt. Their problematic recognizes the desire for safety and the construction of an identity while it interrogates that construction, noting its 189 suppression of differences within, highlighting its always provisional nature, and examining its enmeshment in networks of power.

It is about the theories (or organised ideas) behind what we think, write and say about the things we wear. When, for example, we mock our male  friends for wearing a shirt that is a bit ‘girly’, complex theories of gender, social status and communication lie behind what we say, usually without our knowing it. When we say that one of our friends has an endearingly retro style but that another is locked in some ghastly eighties time warp, we are using theories about what history is and how fashion relates to history.

These theories and ideas in a way are about that makes us think about what ideas or theories are and how they colour or even make possible the things we think, write and say about the things we wear. It is about these ideas in a way that makes us think ‘Who is this “we”, this “us” that is doing the thinking, writing and saying?’ How does what we wear make us a group, an ‘us’ or a ‘we’? And it is about the relations between ‘us’, what and how we communicate through what we wear and how, as Jean-Luc Nancy says, that communication, that being ‘in touch’, makes us into an ‘us’ in the frst place (Nancy 2000: 13, quoted in Derrida 2005: 115).

When we say ‘fashion’, do we mean the same thing as when we say ‘clothing’ or ‘dress’, and is saying ‘the things we wear’ any different from saying ‘fashion’, ‘clothing’ or ‘dress’? What ideas and theories lie behind these words, and how might they affect the meaning of what we think and say about fashion? It is not impossible that we are thinking and saying things we don’t actually understand, and if we don’t know what we’re talking about, how will anyone else? So, this is an attempt to identify and explain some of the ideas and theories behind what we think and say about what we wear. In order to begin this task, will consider three questions, ‘What is fashion?’, ‘What is theory?’ and ‘What is fashion theory?’

Even at frst glance, the apparently simple question ‘What is fashion?’ is not an easy one to answer. Fashion is either one of the crowning achievements of western civilisation or it is incontrovertible evidence of consumer culture’s witless obsession with the trivial and the unreal.

It is either creative to the point of being an ‘art’, enabling individuals and cultures to express their inner feelings and personalities, or it is exploitative to the point of criminality, forcing people to work and spend more than is healthy for them or society. For H. G. Wells’s extinct uncle, fashion was ‘the foam on the ocean of vulgarity . . . the vulgar – blossoming’ (Wells 1895: 17). For William Hazlitt, fashion was merely the sign of ‘folly and vanity’ (quoted in Bell 1947: 112).

However, for James Laver, fashion and clothing are ‘the furniture of the mind made visible’ (quoted in Lurie 1981: 3), and for Susan Ferleger Brades, art and fashion ‘overlap’ and pursue a common set of visual discoveries (Ferleger Brades in Hayward Gallery 1998: Preface). Taking a more practical approach, one may point to one’s coat and say, ‘This Balenciaga coat is fashion’, or one may suggest that ‘Fashion is what people wear’. Answers such as these would suffce for most people in most situations most of the time.

However, most people are not routinely occupied in the analysis and critical explanation of fashion, and some people never involve themselves in such activities. For those of us that are so engaged, the question ‘What is fashion?’ demands our full attention: how are we to analyse and explain fashion if we do not know what fashion is?

The western fashion system is a complex assortment of industries that work together and in tandem to produce, promote, and sell new products. Within the fashion system are forecasters, designers, manufacturers, marketers, merchandisers, sales representatives, managers, promoters, and retailers, each of whom has a role in fostering fashion change.

What they decide to produce (or not produce), or to promote (or not promote), ultimately affects what may become fashion. It is necessary to understand that while businesses have a role in developing new styles, consumers have an equally important role in accepting new styles. Ultimately, consumers have to adopt the new style en masse for it to become a fashion.

The fashion industry is segmented into levels based on price point and relative quality. On the high-price/high-quality level is haute couture. Haute couture are high-end, one-of-a-kind garments that are produced for a limited clientele. In haute couture the client visits the designer, who will take measurements or even construct a dress form to the exact measurements of the client’s body.

The design will be handmade from the finest fabrics and once completed the pattern and muslins will be destroyed. True haute couture houses are members of La Chambre Syndicale de la Couture, a governing body for the industry. The cost of one garment can be in the thousands of euros or United States dollars.

Such responses assume that one already knows enough about what fashion is to identify Balenciaga coats as examples of it, but do not actually tell us anything about what fashion is. They are therefore said to ‘beg the question’. They also hide or obscure the way in which the meaning of ‘fashion’ drifts in and out of the sense of the ‘fashionable’: while this Balenciaga coat may be fashionable now, it will be unfashionable next year and yet it will still be an example of fashion.

Answers such as the one earlier in which it is suggested that fashion is simply what people wear will not do either. It, too, presupposes that one already knows what fashion is (how could one identify people wearing it otherwise?).

Also, some people do not wear fashion in the sense that what they have on is fashionable, or ‘in fashion’ at the moment, and others wear things that are simply not fashion items. This drifting or slippage of ‘fashion’ in and out of the sense of ‘fashionable’ is something that requires explanation.

It is as a noun that the word ‘fashion’ is probably most familiar to us, and it is as a noun that the word leads us into more or less confusion. As such, ‘fashion’ may apparently be used interchangeably with words such as ‘dress’ and ‘style’, as in ‘the latest and most admired style’, noted earlier. Consumer goods in general also appear to be synonymous with ‘fashion’, as in ‘consumer goods in the current mode’, as also provided earlier.

Two things are happening here. First, fashion is being defned in relation to various other phenomena (‘dress’, ‘adornment’ and ‘style’, for example). Entwistle points out that ‘dress’ and ‘adornment’ have an anthropological pedigree and are used because anthropology is looking for an ‘all-inclusive term that denotes all the things that people do to their bodies’ (Entwistle 2000: 40).

‘Fashion’ is more specifc than ‘dress’ or ‘adornment’ and denotes a particular ‘system of dress that is found in western modernity’ (Ib.). Second, fashion seems to invite or include the sense of ‘in fashion’. This is the same move as found in the word ‘style’, where the meaning of style as ‘the manner or way of doing something’ slides into ‘a socially or culturally approved way of doing something’, and it is probably just as unavoidable.

While neither of these things helps us to find a simple or once-and-for-all defnition of fashion, neither actually prevents us from gaining an understanding of what fashion is. Defning fashion in terms of a network or structure of other elements is inevitable: it is the way language works, and we should get used to it. And the second thing, the inclusion of being in fashion into the meaning of fashion, is probably also unavoidable.

We seem to end up with Anne Hollander’s defnition of fashion: Everybody has to get dressed in the morning and go about the day’s business . . . [w]hat everybody wears to do this has taken different forms in the West for about seven hundred years and that is what fashion is. (Hollander 1994: 11)

This may sound, ironically enough, as though we are back where we started, with ‘fashion is what people wear’, but ‘what people wear’ should be understood to include (but not be exhausted by) all instances of what people wear, from catwalk creations, through High Street and outlet purchases, to police and military uniforms.

Consequently, we will not concentrate exclusively on fashion: it is interested in what people wear, and insofar as what people wear in modern western countries is fashion, then it is interested in fashion. Another problem that arises here is that fashion sounds as though it is different from clothing; while clothing sounds like, or has connotations of, the sort of thing one wears every day and is mundane, fashion connotes glamour and sounds somehow special and different from clothing.

However, if fashion is what people wear to go about their everyday lives, as Anne Hollander says, then fashion has to include what we would usually want to call clothing or ‘what people wear’. Such a defnition, however useful it is here, invites challenges as to what counts as ‘western’ and what counts as ‘modern’. It may presuppose ‘modernity’ and ‘westernity’.

In response, it can be argued that it is simply the case that the existence of fashion in a society is a good test of whether that society is modern, or western. A society in which there are not different classes, no social structure and in which upward mobility in a class structure is neither possible nor desirable has no need of fashion, and it might reasonably be described as being neither modern nor western.

Similarly, while fashion may be about the body,as Joanne Entwistle says,it is also, as she also says, about the ‘fashioned’ body (Entwistle 2000: 1). By ‘the fashioned body’ one is obliged to understand, not a natural or Edenic body, but a ‘produced’ and therefore ‘cultured’ body. This is partly because one of the meanings of fashion (as a verb) is ‘to make’ or ‘to produce’ and partly because there can be no simple, un-cultured, natural body.

Even when naked, the body is posed or held in certain ways, it makes gestures and it is thoroughly meaningful. To say that the fashioned body is always a cultured body is also to say that the fashioned body is a meaningful body, and that it is therefore about communication.

This is because saying that fashion is meaningful is to say that fashion is a cultural phenomenon. The reason for this, in turn, is that culture is about shared meanings and the communication and understanding of those meanings.

The sharing of meanings and being in communication is what makes a cultural group a cultural group ‘in the first place’ (Cherry 1957: 4). Given this, we can say that differently cultured bodies communicate different things (meanings) by means of the different things (clothes, fashion) that they wear. Fashion is thus defined as modern, western, meaningful and communicative bodily adornments, or dress.  It is also explained as a profoundly cultural phenomenon.

It is probably not unreasonable to suggest that common, everyday or non-specialist accounts of theory include the ideas that it involves the use of highly abstract and often needlessly diffcult conceptual frameworks to provide complex explanations of phenomena that are actually quite simple and straightforward.

Playing a series of crunchy, satisfying power chords on an electric guitar does not need (and sounds no better for knowing) the music theory that concerns perfect fifths. Checking one’s change at the store is no less accurate for not knowing the theory of real numbers. It may come as a surprise, therefore, to learn that our word ‘theory’ derives from an ancient Greek word (theoria) meaning nothing more abstract or complicated than ‘looking’ or ‘vision’: ‘theorein’ means ‘to look at’ and ‘theoros’ means ‘spectator’.

The abstraction, complexity and diffculty associated with theory and conceptual activity appear to be entirely absent from what is experienced every day in the simple practices of seeing, looking at and spectating or beholding something.

However, this surprise should be short-lived if we consider the well-known story concerning the farmer, the general and the art student standing together in a field. Asked to describe what they see; each gives an entirely different account.

The farmer sees a profitable unit with good drainage, which would be easy to plough and would support arable crops. The general sees an exposed killing field that would be impossible to defend. And the art student sees a pastoral scene that would make a delightful watercolor if the trees on the left were a darker shade of green and moved a little to the right.

Looking at the field, each sees something different, according to the conceptual frameworks they adopt: to this extent, what they see is a product of the theories they are accustomed to using. The farmer is employing a combination of economics, biology and geology to produce what one might call agricultural theory; the general is employing military theory; and the student is employing aesthetic theory. As a result of the different theories, the different conceptual and abstract resources each has at their disposal, each ‘sees’ something different.

A theory, then, might be thought of as a set or framework of concepts, the purpose of which is to describe and explain a specific phenomenon. This story introduces a problem that is relevant to all theory, theories and theorizing. The problem concerns the extent to which the object being studied is a product of the theory employed to study it and is known as the ‘theory-ladeness’ of ‘facts’ or the theory-dependency of what is ostensibly innocent observation.

To the farmer, it is true, or a fact, that the field will support arable crops; to the general, it is a true fact that the field is impossible to defend; and to the art student, it is a fact that the imagined watercolour would be improved by moving the trees.

Each of the ‘facts’, however, is a product of or dependent upon the theory that is being used. Paradoxically, then, while theory may be the use of abstract, conceptual frameworks in the explanation and analysis of phenomena, theory is also necessary in order to see those phenomena ‘in the first place’. The derivation of our word ‘theory’ from the Greek ‘theoria’ (‘vision’ or ‘looking’) should therefore alert us to the role of conceptual work in constructing our visual experience.

Everything we see is the product of conceptual frameworks, or what amount to theoretical constructs, being applied to the so-called raw data that are supplied by the eyes to the brain. The derivation might also help us to appreciate the metaphorical drift in the meaning of the word ‘see’ from seeing as a visual experience to seeing as understanding.

This drift is well understood in the everyday English phrase ‘I see what you mean’, where a word used to describe a visual experience (seeing) is used to represent an experience which is not visual (understanding).

Seeing is already understanding because it is a product of the application of conceptual frameworks (theories) to visual experience, and consequently the everyday and apparently straightforward activities of ‘seeing’ and ‘looking at’ involve a good deal more abstraction and are a good deal more complicated than was implied earlier. In short, they involve more conceptual or theoretical activity than is commonly appreciated.

The story also introduces a signifcant difference between the sorts of theories that are appropriate to, and the kinds of accounts that might be expected from, the study of fashion. The farmer used theories from biology and geology to construct and describe what she or he saw, and the art student used aesthetic theory to construct and describe what she or he saw; the difference to be noted is that between the natural sciences on the one hand and the social sciences and humanities on the other.

The natural sciences are concerned with the explanation and predictability of natural phenomena – the ‘mastery’ of the physical universe. And in the natural sciences it was long thought that theory was the product of the observation of those phenomena. Francis Bacon (1561–1626) was one of the frst scientists to depart from medieval traditions and to ‘emphasise the role of positive science and its observational character’ (Larrain 1979: 19).

Positive science stresses the role of facts, and a science that begins with the observation of phenomena is called empirical science. The idea is that the scientist observes the phenomena and then constructs a theory to explain the facts. This is known as the inductive method, and it was thought to be a description of the scientifc method used by the natural sciences: in other words, it was believed to be a description of what happened in the natural sciences.

The empirical natural sciences were developing rapidly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and Giddens, for example, writes of the ‘sensational illumination and explanatory power’ of the natural sciences at this time (1976: 13).The methods used to such tremendous effect by the natural sciences at this time, then, were positivist (stressing the objective existence of facts) and empiricist (stressing the role of observation).

The social sciences of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries needed a method that would guarantee them the same levels of explanatory and predictive success that were being enjoyed by the natural sciences. In the social sciences and humanities, however, idealist and interpretative traditions that are absent from the natural sciences come into play. Idealist traditions insist on the predominant role of thought, or theory, in investigation, and interpretative traditions emphasise the part that an individual’s or actor’s understandings of what is happening plays in human knowledge.

It is over the nature of facts and observation, and the roles of positivism and empiricism, that some of the major methodological debates in the social sciences have occurred. One debate, noted earlier, concerns whether observations and facts in the social sciences are the same kinds of thing as observations and facts in the natural sciences. Another has been to do with whether empiricism is the best way of understanding social actors; the social sciences want to provide true explanations of social phenomena, but an additional claim, to understanding, is also made on their behalf.

Consequently, the predicting and controlling functions of the natural sciences are often received rather poorly by social scientists, but the notion that understanding social phenomena is key is often stressed. Bauman, for example, says that ‘social phenomena . . . demand to be understood in a different way than by mere explaining’ (1978: 12).

‘Mere explaining’ is found in the natural sciences, but understanding social phenomena ‘must contain an element missing from the explanation of natural phenomena’. What is missing from natural phenomena is the actor’s purpose or intention, the fact that what people do is meaningful to those people and to the people around them, and the social sciences must therefore pay attention to understanding that meaning. This extra dimension that is present in the social sciences and humanities is an interpretative or ‘hermeneutic’ dimension.

Having explained what fashion is and having explained what theory is, this Introduction should now be perfectly placed to explain what fashion theory is. It would appear to be simply a matter of adding the one to the other. Unfortunately, the situation is not quite as simple as that. There is no one set of ideas or no single conceptual framework with which fashion might be defned, analysed and critically explained. Consequently, there is no single discipline, approach or discrete body of work that can be identifed and presented here as fashion theory. Rather, there are theories about fashion or, to put it another way, there are fashion theories.

What one finds is that various and diverse academic disciplines applying themselves or are applied to the practices, institutions, personnel and objects that constitute fashion. Each discipline has its own set or sets of ideas and conceptual frameworks in terms of which it defines, analyses and explains fashion. Each discipline, then, comes with its own theory, or theories, in terms of which it goes about the task of studying fashion.

This Introduction needs to ascertain which disciplines and which theories therefore might be applied to fashion in order to explain, analyse and understand it. In his The Structures of Everyday Life, Fernand Braudel (1981) says that the history of costume is ‘less anecdotal than would appear. It touches on every issue – raw materials, production processes, manufacturing costs, cultural stability, fashion and social hierarchy’ (Braudel 1981: 311).

By ‘less anecdotal’ he means less dependent on random or accidental observations and more on the product of sustained theoretical or idea-driven enquiry. The idea-driven enquiries he has in mind here are academic disciplines, and they include economics and cultural and social theory. Lisa Tickner also stresses the way in which many different academic disciplines are required for the study of fashion. Fashion is ‘a rich and multi-disciplinary subject, and a point at which history, economics, anthropology, sociology and psychology could be said to meet’ (Tickner 1977: 56).

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