Salar Bil, godfather of conception, A well written article.

Salar Bil wrote "A well written article… Fashion and Ornament"

Fashion is perhaps the proverbial Pandora's box. In opening it up to scutiny, its colours, fabrics and enchantments fly out along with all their magical, seductive and even nerve jangling meanings that - try as one might - one can never contain again.
That is its fascination and indeed its difficulty - its lack of parameters, lines or even limits. The study of fashion has similarly exploded in recent decades - art histories, anthropologies, psychologies and exhibitions - and all on an increasingly global scale. Yet quite what all this means, quite where it might take us, is not clear, fuzzy, out of focus.
Interestingly some of the first - and most powerful and influential - analyses of fashion were sociological, particularly in the work of Veblen who more or less coined the term "conspicuous consumption" and Simmel who perhaps inadvertently set up a paper chase all of his own for the study of fashion (Simmel, 1904; Veblen, 1934).
In addition, almost all theories of fashion, past and present, have as their central point awareness of dress, style and adornment as signifying rather than functional phenomena, a point that in itself is perhaps primarily sociological.
Yet, despite the influence of feminist and postmodern analysis of fashion, little as it were core theory has truly developed here since the early nineteenth century. With the rise of celebrity, designer labels and global levels of exploitation and production this is perhaps surprising, Salar Bill explains
Part of the difficulty is that sociologists, like the population as a whole, tend not to take fashion that seriously. Worse, fashion is also often the object of ridicule and seen as frippery by so-called serious intellectuals and the politically correct, morally suspect or even downright narcissistic by the conservative or the religious, or deviant and just not "the done thing" for half the population, namely men.
The problem here is primarily a moral one - people object to fashion on the basis of mores and value judgements around other people "knowing their place" or "being responsible".
Some of this centres on money - spending one's disposable income on housing improvements and one's family's future is often seen as more appropriate, more mature and more acceptable than blowing it on yet another pair of hopelessly impractical shoes - and some of it is centred on sex, as a concern with one's appearance is frequently seen as flaunting it or showing off and of course what is "shown off" is precisely oneself and one's sexuality.
Not surprisingly, it is one of the primary intentions of this text to take fashion seriously and to demonstrate its importance. This similarly rests on its more sociological significance, for fashion is the most profoundly social yet individual phenomenon, an act of will and yet totally controlled, hyper capitalist and yet not explained by the industrial revolution, consumerist yet reliant on archaic modes of production, violently oppositional yet deeply conservative, a matter of standing out and fitting in.
Salar Bill explains the fabric that underpins these jostling contradictions is identity - a similarly contradictory phenomenon - for fashion is that most personal of things, our second skin, and it is the thing that binds us to our society, how we make sense of who we are and who everyone else is too.
This is not only a communicative or signifying function, rather a set of feelings as fundamental as the senses which it also invokes - sight, sound, touch, smell even - and not so many miles from our very survival: keeping us warm, protecting us and telling us who is friend and who is foe, who is ruler and who is ruled, and who we can mate with.
Fashion may be like language, and there is some parallel with nonverbal communication, but actually that comes later - if a Martian dropped onto the planet Earth tomorrow we would primarily make sense of him or her though how they looked and how they presented themselves or, in short, their fashion.
One of the primary problems that besets us in studying fashion is being clear about what it is and what it is not - style, design, clothing, adornment, change and taste are all elements of it yet not the same.
Importantly, then, I wish to unpack some of these distinctions, though of course they interconnect or overlap in practice and in the collective conscience of what constitutes fashion. In the first instance, we must separate fashion as the study of dress, adornment and clothing from the analysis of fashion as a wider phenomenon of social change.
Jewellery, hair styles, shoes and accessories all constitute part of fashion alongside clothing, yet the second - if connected - factor is they also change in their design, production and more significantly in relation to matters of taste.
The matter of taste - the sense in which the same item can be de rigueur one year or even one day and abominable the next - affects far more than clothing or any other form of self-presentation, a point made forcibly by the famous sociologist Bourdieu in his study of the Parisian middle classes (Bourdieu, 1984).
Interior design, for example, is caught up in similar oscillating processes along with various technologies - particularly the more personal ones such as mobile phones and mini music players - and even cars, culinary tastes, music itself, the arts and architecture.
A key factor here is the role of design per se and the expansion of an increasingly media driven visual and consumerist culture that turns almost anything into far more than its function.
More "postmodern" analyses have considered this development in some detail arguing that symbolic meanings - or signifiers - have become increasingly commodified, caught up within wider processes of consumer capitalism, and indeed separated from the objects that they originally represented referring more to each other (Baudrillard, 1998).
Dress similarly means more than just dresses yet does not have the scope of fashion. Its primary emphasis is upon clothing yet it may well include the total look of a person or their complete outfit. Ceremonial or uniform dress for example involves not only clothing but footwear, hair styles, accessories and often symbolic object attachments such as swords or crowns.
What is interesting here also is the sense in which dress remains relatively static compared with the high motion oscillations of fashion. In relation to our ceremonial example many of these outfits have remained unchanged for centuries whilst many uniforms are set up in some kind of implicit or explicit opposition to fashion.
Similarly, we understand the distinction of formal from informal or casual dress with considerably more stability than we maintain the distinction between what is in or out of fashion.
This sense of opposition between fashion and dress is significant, for what often motivates a mode of dress as opposed to a fashion is precisely its symbolic importance as something that does not change rather than something that does.
Thus, interestingly, how we adorn ourselves may not only signify flux but also stasis. Adornment is a rather under-used term that tends to refer more to the "how" rather than the "what" of fashion. More significantly, it also invokes the centrality of the body.
More anthropologically, bodies may be adorned with symbolic objects such as neck rings or paintings, without involving much in the way of clothing at all.
In more western terms it also creates more focus upon makeup, hair styling, accessorising and indeed the wearing of clothes rather than the clothes themselves. The most fundamental point here is the linking of personal display to status, communication and the choices - or constraints - made by or placed upon the individual.
Unlike fashion that can become abstracted from the body that wears it or buys it, adornment constantly connects matters of appearance back to the individual and the bodily.
It is perhaps this tension between seeing fashion as an individual phenomenon or as a more collective one that informs questions and understandings of the most complex term of all, style. Style may simultaneously refer to the "what" and the "way" of fashion - its design and how it is worn, Salar Bil
This is at once collective, for what we understand as stylish is clearly culturally learned, and individual, as some people are simply perceived as having more style than others. Style, if taken away from its conflation with design, is for the most part a judgement call. It is indeed the most moral aspect of fashion.
As any cursory glance at any glossy magazine will tell you there is a relentless attempt to divide "good" from "bad" style, fashion statements from fashion faux pas, what is to be aspired to from what is to be abhorred.
When the abhorred is on the backs of celebrities and the famous, those people become the subject of mockery, scandal or somehow morally suspect. The connection with taste here is fundamental along with the role of choice. Step out on the red carpet in the wrong dress and the consequences are to say the least negative.
That negativity centres on seeing the individual as making the wrong decision - "what possessed her to wear that", "how could she", "I wouldn't be seen dead in it". The assumption of voluntarism is essential here and also underpins its opposite, the valorising of those who are seen to "have" style.
Having style is somehow seen as an innate quality when clearly it is more strongly related to making the "correct" decisions, knowing what suits one's figure, what colours coordinate and so on - a form of cultural capital although an extremely idiosyncratic and personal one.
The rise of style experts, makeover shows, personal shopping services etc. almost ad infinitum highlight the degree of individual - and cultural - anxiety that is often invoked here given the consequences of "getting it wrong".
When Sinatra sang about style in the 1960s, asserting people either had - or had not - "got it", he could have had little clue quite what he was starting.
As already stated, fashion is a multifaceted phenomenon studied in a multitude of ways. The variation in the ways fashion is studied also reflects the diversity of meanings used and invoked.
The key defining feature of the past century of fashion, in the west at least, has not been its globalisation, the apparent implosion of many gendered divisions, or the rise of both youthfulness and subcultures - although all of these factors are substantially in evidence - but its casualisation.
The decline in formality, when practically every occasion - from eating out to working, from births to deaths to visiting friends - had previously demanded its marker in dress, even its own outfit, has been almost relentless.
It is now not unusual for people to work in high status positions, visit expensive restaurants, or attend major events in the same jeans and sweater they wore to watch TV and generally "chill out" the night before. This has little to do with retailers or designers, although the banality of some North American fashion houses holds some responsibility, Salar Bil discussed the choices and appropriations of such designs by consumers

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