In Kaja Silverman's "Fragments of a Fashionable Discourse," it says that people are judged by what they wear, not what they actually look like. This made me think about men and women who work out extensively at the gym in order to get their idea of a perfect body. Some people’s goals in working out is to be healthy, but more often than not it is to impress people and have people be more attracted to the person. The argument in Silverman’s article does not align with what I have seen daily in my life, because people are not going to be seen as more attractive if they do not have a desirable body even if they dress nicely. Nice clothes that look good on a person are more likely to be noticed by females than males. If a guy dresses nicely, this could make him seem more attractive, but only if he is physically attractive as well. The order of how people first analyze the appeal of a person is automatically the physical looks first, then the clothes and personality in that order of importance.
Another topic talked about in Silverman’s article was concerning how, after the centuries of a male-dominated fashion world, the industry began to focus on females and the males felt emasculated by this. The men were upset about not being able to wear wigs and fine clothes because they felt like it took away from who they felt they were. This I found absurd after thinking about today’s culture and how it is almost always the norm for women to care more about what they’re wearing than men. The article says that the changing fashion industry in a way “castrates men” because it takes away “all their finery” and doesn’t allow them to dress up. This would most likely never happen in today’s society; in most cases, dressing up fancily would have an impact on the man’s ego and sense of masculinity. Men do not wear makeup or do much to enhance their appearance in today’s culture, so I feel like they would think that dressing up like men did in the 15th-17th centuries would make them feel like they were being forced to be someone unnatural and fake.
The idea that physical appearance overshadows one's clothing is a very good point that is left out of Silverman's essay. I think that this is true more and more in today's society, as we see Abercrombie ads selling clothes through the appeal of the body. For example, most of their ads for men's jeans focus mainly on the model's big muscles and abs. The marketing strategy here is to sell apparel through physical attractiveness of the body. The modeling industry today is very selective based on physical appearance. It is interesting to think about how the fashion industry would change if it weren't for this selectiveness.
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