Fashion seemed to be for a while the only thing that had managed to remain in its industry as a tangible product, well... of course that is a given. We remain to require clothing after all, therefore it has to be a physical product. But items that used to be a part of popular culture, film, books, music, magazines and games are now becoming less tangible and more phantom, the phrase 'ghosts in our machines' is almost
fitting today.
These are items that are no longer held, touched or chosen from a shelf amongst an array of a well kept collection. Though the need for less packaging, paper and something that can become scratched, broken and ripped, is no longer a worry as well as the positive environmental impact of digital media. But there is a sense of loss of what it once meant to buy a CD, my older siblings who were seventies and eighties teens, would often buy a album for the cover alone.
However I am not just talking about fashion being a tangible item, in the sense of the product we buy, but the design aspect of it has started to become lost in the digital age of short cuts.
With an influx in online gaming, sites like star doll, fashionclub.com, and then there are sites that claim to offer a product used by design schools, offering a cad software, young teens and budding designers can now design a dress online from a limited set of styles, cuts and colours. But for me fashion is about pushing boundaries, David Bowies 1974 Album cover as a half human half dog or the tongue in cheek usage of Imagery on Pink Floyds 2006 Album cover releases for a Jigsaw Puzzle. But this was lost amongst consumers, by then the digital revolution had taken place. Pre 2000, this cover may have raised a few eye-brows.
The connection to fashion? Well we should not be confined by rules in fashion and art, and that is what other forms of media used to represent, freedom of thought.
There is a structure to designing, but also don't limit yourself, fashion design is about textures, and even sounds and smells. Use all senses to evoke the right imagery. As Chanel once said: “Fashion is not something that exists in dresses only. Fashion is in the sky, in the street, fashion has to do with ideas, the way we live, and what is happening.”
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| Experimentation is KEY, Karl Lagerfeld exemplifies this while keeping his design work structured. |
