"Fashion fades, only style remains"
- Coco Chanel
Fashion changes from year to year, decade to decade, and century to century. Clothing has always had a significance for males and females but through the bombardment of print advertising, public relations, and a surge for the luxury market, class differences are apparent through fashion. In Kaja Silverman's "Fragments of a Fashionable Discourse", she argues that fashion "challenges the assumption of a fixed identity [...] at the behest of capital" and that in turn can stimulate class difference (148). I find this claim very interesting because it is something that I find prevalent in society.
Chanel at Paris Fashion Week
Fall/Winter 2011-2012
Luxury brands such as Chanel, Dior, Roberto Cavalli, etc. offer women an identity that will be looked upon as powerful, desirable, and unique. Really their marketing is towards women of higher class that can afford such looks, while alienating the majority of the middle-class population. As in the Coco Chanel quote, style is something that will always remain with those brands and that illusion is sold to women. So when purchasing fashion pieces, women are not only buying the material possession but also the illusion that luxury companies have constructed of their products enhancing the female lifestyle.
Definitely fashion is an expression of society and the way of how each person expresses individually. Even if it can be used by conglomerates to put pressure over population, it is also a way of how each individual can express themselves.
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