QUOTES : Style Identity and Meaning by Fiona Anderson

QUOTES
Fiona Anderson Fashion: Style, identity and Meaning in Matthew Rampley (ed) (2005)Exploring Visual Culture Edinburgh Uni Press
GROUP 1
In all societies the body is ‘dressed’ and everywhere dress and adornment play symbolic, communicative and aesthetic roles. Dress is always ‘unspeakably meaningful’. The earliest forms of ‘clothing ‘ seem to have been adornments such as body painting, ornaments, scarifications (scarring), tattooing, masks and often constricting neck and waist bands. Many of these deformed, reformed or otherwise modified the body.
The question of whether these earlier forms of ‘dressing’ the body should be viewed in a similar way to historical or contemporary fashionable dress P 68
GROUP 2
A women which is faire in shew, is foule in condition: she is like unto a glow worme, which is bright in the hedge, and blacke in the hand; in the greenest grasse lyeth hid the greatest serpents: painted potts commonly hold deadly poison: and in the cleerest water the ugliest Tode; the fairest woman hath some filthiness in her.
Such criticisms had scant effect on the rise of fashion consumption as popular pursuit, but they helped to create a pervasive view of fashion as immoral, wasteful, trivial and feminine. P 69
GROUP 3
In his essay ‘Fashion’ (1904), Simmel pinpoints the role of fashionable dress as a means to negotiate the tensions between fitting in with the crowd, and expressing a distinctive, sense of individuality. He states:
Fashion is the imitation of a given example and satisfies the demand for social adaption...at the same time it satisfies in no less degree the need of differentiation, the tendency towards dissimilarity, the desire for constant change and contrast. P 71
GROUP 4
The relatively backward status of fashion manufacturing stands in marked contrast to the aggressive and innovatory profile of modern fashion marketing and advertising. From the late nineteenth century fashion consumption was further stimulated by the development of increasingly sophisticated marketing, advertising and retailing techniques, as epitomised by the new overwhelming luxurious department stores of the era. P 77
GROUP 5
Youth cultures are thus seen here as the sites of struggles over the control of meaning in rapidly developing consumer culture, struggles played out in dress, demeanor, music and language. The notion of resistance was central to these early interpretations of youth sub-cultures – style was seen as a form of defiance, political protest or semiotic guerrilla warfare.
However, subcultures are often viewed in a rather romanticised way, as a form of pure or ‘authentic’ resistance against mainstream social, political and cultural values. P 79
GROUP 7
From the 1970’s onwards, and particularly since the 1980’s predominant fashion designers such as Jean Paul Gaultier and Vivienne Westwood have explored the persistence of gender coding conventions and stereotypes through their designs. In most contexts nonconformity to gender roles through dress tends to signal lack of social conformity in a broader sense. P 74
GROUP 6
The Objects and images of fashion may also involve potent critiques of mainstream values and ideals. Hence the tendency of some contemporary fashion designers and photographers, such as Alexander McQueen and Nick Knight, to use an ephemeral medium to comment on fundamental issues such as death and the vulnerability of the body. P 83