Contents
l. Introduction 1
2. Elements of Fashion and Apparel 21
3. Exotic Impulses in Fashion and Apparel 35
4. Fashion Design and Product Development 63
5. Female to Feminine 86
6. Fashion Entrepreneurship 115
7. Fashion Photography 141
8. Lingerie to Swim wear 164
9. Using Perfume and Techniques of Make-Up 195
10. Fashion Merchandising 219
11. Fashion and its Formation 249
1
Introduction
The Face of Fashion
The Apparel and Textile Design major provides students with professional preparation in designing apparel and textile soft goods. Students create and evaluate designs considering interactions among the person, the product, and the environments in which they are used. Students are taught to assess the needs, values, goals, and resources as they propose design solutions. Products are designed to promote comfort, performance, and aesthetic satisfaction. The ultimate aim is to improve-the quality of life and the quality of the environment.
Apparel designers in the twenty-first century will form new alliances with professionals in interdisciplinary teams. These teams may include apparel designers and biomechanical engineers, textile chemists and physicists, or medical scientists. Emphasis is placed on effective decision-making and communication with professionals in other disciplines, employers, employees, and clients. Computer-aided design technology is used to create innovative design solutions to functional and aesthetic design problems.
Western culture is developing a grand love affair with the distinctive fashion style that is India: Along with Indian music and spirituality, Indian Clothing is having a huge impact on the mainstream identities of western style and culture. Cognates provide students with additional depth in a focused area of study; these include entrepreneurship, design communications, historic and cultural studies, material science, and applied art. Indian people express themselves a great deal through their clothing. Their spiritual quest for perfection plays a role in their choices of beautifully coloured, dramatic, and flowing garments. The styles speak to the spirit with sumptuous, vibrant colours woven into the intricate and ornate designs to be found resonating throughout India.
Started as an alternative dress form in Kashmir and Punjab, it has grown in popularity all over India and in all the muslim countries of the world, especially with younger women. With Celebrities like Goldie hawn, Sally field, Hillary Clinton, Jeniffer Lopez and the Late Princess Diana adorning the Sal war (Shalwar) kameez at high profile events, this garment is the clearly the current flavour in the West.
Salwars are pajama-like trousers gathered at the waist and ankles, worn underneath a long, loose tunic known as a kameez. Sal war or shalwar can be worn in many styles. Styles keep changing with Trends. Recently big bottoms were in fashion and now short Kurtas are back in vogue.
From a simple masquerade to the mask, from a ‘role’ (personnage) to a ‘person’ (personne), to a name, to an individual; from the latter to a being possessing metaphysical and moral value; from a moral consciousness to a scared being; from the latter to a fundamental form of thought and action-the course is complete.
Fashion is often thought of as a kind of mask disguising the ‘true’ nature of the body or person. It is seen as a superficial gloss. Yet, if we follow Mauss and Bourdieu, we can regard the ways in which we clothe the body as an active process or technical means for constructing and presenting a bodily self. Western fashion (elite or high fashion) is a particular variant of this in which the designer plays the role of definer.
Cendars’s theme, that women wear their bodies through their clothes, is central to The Face of Fashion. Delaunay’s approach to clothes was revolutionary. She combined her interest in the 1920s art movements of cubism, futurism and fauvism with a belief th~ women’s clothes should suit their new lifestyles. Accordingly, Delaunay favoured simple practical lines of clothing which followed the shape of the female body (rather than dictating it). But she then took the surface of the fabric and the way in which it draped the body as a canvas on which she designed unique body paintings. In anticipation of Roland Barthes, she transformed the female body into maps of vectors, forces and dynamic movements.
Her clothes were characterised by bold geometric patterns and colours that followed the bodily vectors, reminiscent of her canvases. This approach to clothing influenced subsequent trends in the fashion industry, although Delaunay’s outspoken views about women’s autonomy in their clothing were somewhat lost. Her designs do suggest new ways to look at the phenomenon of fashion.
The starting-point of this book is the dissolution and reconstitution of the term fashion. While acknowledging that not all clothing is fashion, all clothing systems have at least a distant relationship with fashion systems and stylistic conventions. For example, military, religious and legal clothing can be related to earlier dress codes where associations of tradition, authority, order, distinctiveness and hierarchy-even intimidation-are deliberately invoked. Moreover, such clothes do change over timealbeit slowly-with considerable thought going into the design of new regalia. The excessive western-style military uniforms adopted by many contemporary military regimes underline the fact that even these garments are directly influenced by fashion.
A recent example has been the ordination of women, necessitating the creation of special clerical robes. In Australia, these red, flowing, yoked surplices featured a broad frontal panel decorated with a design chosen by each woman-a concession to women’s interest in fashion, perhaps. While women have adopted this variation on traditional garb for church services, they are wearing other outfits (more like a corporate wardrobe) for their non-pulpit duties. Their designs combined style with practicality.
Adele Palmer described her mix-and-match array of pants, shirt, jacket and coat dress, in finely pinstriped black wool, as ‘a fairly demure outlook with a certain reverent attitude’. Jill Fitzsimon proposed a longline jacket and ‘modest but fashionable’ length skirt in mid-grey wool teamed with a white ‘draped neckline blouse’ featuring ‘a delicate random blue cross print-a chic alternative to the dog collar’.
Linda Jackson’s choice was ‘an intense blue’ wool or linen suit, consisting of a straight skirt and long-line single-breasted jacket buttoned to the neck. A matching white blouse featured a dog-collar neckline. She also designed a cyclamen pink smock for more formal occasions.
The designs attempted to balance the austerity of religious garb with the conventions of career dress, yet also incorporate elements of high fashion. Thus, all the designs featured a collar (variations on the dog collar) or incorporated a high neckline, ‘modest’ skirt or jacket length, and the insignia (a cross) of office (as jewellery or patterned the fabric).
Each designer stressed the need to create identifiable and distinctive outfits which displayed a symbol of religious ministry. This example illustrates how the clothing of women clergy constitutes a technical means of fulfilling an occupational role by clothing the body to produce particular practical, social and gestural effects. The bricolage of fashion systems combined in these designs suggests that fashion systems interact and compete in the production of appropriate garb.
The viewpoint adopted here rejects the assumption that fashion is unique to the culture of capitalism. That argument draws on the work of Simmel and Veblen who explicitly linked the development of fashion to the emergence of discourses of individualism, class, civilisation and consumerism. Moreover, this concept of fashion is specifically European or western, and is differentiated from the clothing behaviour of other cultures. Simmel’s views have grounded subsequent work. He argued that:
This motive of foreignness, which fashion employs in its socialising endeavours, is restricted to higher civilisation, because novelty, which foreign origin guarantees in extreme form is often regarded by primitive races as an evil. This is certainly one of the reasons why primitive conditions of life favour a correspondingly infrequent change of fashions.