University helps me learn new ways to work everyday, it learns me how to do research, but also how to think by myself, to make up my ideas. This year, for my thesis, I am focusing on fashion, and all of my researches and readings tend to lean towards the same final idea: fashion is not art. I am nobody in this privileged world, and my words do not have any weight, however I am one of the person who does believe that fashion is very close to art. Fashion can be art, who would wear a Dior Couture dress to go shopping? It is not anymore made to be worn, it is made to be exhibited. Hence the growing importance of the Victoria & Albert Museum, hence the Vuitton exhibition in New York, hence all the magnificent coffee table books on fashion and designers. The more I learn on this field, the more I observe the process of creating fashion, but also the process of creating a discourse of fashion, the way fashion appears, where and how it does take roots, the more I believe in a mesmerizing artistic and aesthetic facet of fashion. The work of the craftsmen, the work of the designer, starting from the first drawing, the work of the fashion journalists who decide what is today's fashion, but also the place fashion occupies within our society, makes me want to believe that this field is much more than the superficial world many people see in it. A product of fashion does not have to be seen solely as an utility. We must appreciate the work, the ideas, and the clothes. Fashion might not be admitted within the art world, but as a lover of fashion, I will always look at a Balenziaga couture dress the same way I look at a Renaissance painting. It is not because it is ephemeral that fashion cannot be studied and loved, actually this makes it even more beautiful. You have to see the beauty in it before it fades away.
xo
Amy
Post a Comment