Post Prompted by Punk: Emotion-Driven Fashion and How to Find Fashion.

Pondering aspects of punk culture - mainly the look it produced, leads me to analysis of fashion deviants and fashion oddities.  Punk culture stemmed from a dissatisfaction with the norm - a quotidien refusal - a feeling of rebellion, which sometimes culminated in destructive tendencies, but was quite often channeled into music or fashion which embodied and released that pent-up feeling.

Considering the psychological aspects of fashion reveals a maze-like and infinite variety of perspectives.  In many instances, fashion is a mask or facade hiding the feelings generating the look.  An array of feelings may be expressed - portraying for example, merely a desire to be different, an aesthetic sensibility, refusal, conformity, or even - privileged boredom.

In studying - and enjoying - these fashion observations, I have found it advantageous to use as a viewing reference the various online resources covering the greatest number of runway collections worldwide - rather than relying on fashion or trade magazine coverage of collections - as the magazines rely upon advertising for their livelihood.  Because of this advertising-dependence, the coverage is biased - so an observer of fashion does not receive a clear view of the truly creative and amazing designs being produced globally, but instead a limited and monetarily-motivated perspective. 

I now see fashion in a different light - perhaps not the spotlight, but daylight - after having read books written by designers and journalists within the fashion industry, and as a result - gaining a better understanding of the cogs and gears within that world. For so many years, I mistakenly perceived fashion magazine and press reports as equating a mark of quality or a seal of approval.   If you too share an interest in the creative, artistic, psychological aspects of fashion - do realize you can find fashion everywhere, all around the world - in the street, on the bus, in the thrift shops, or there beneath the needle of your own sewing machine - not just on the runway or in the pages of a magazine.

Just as our language, music, technologies - and lives have evolved and bloomed and hybridized, so has our visual language of fashion - which has changed so much from its earliest origin of being primarily utilitarian, then decorative.  Fashion is very often - now - a feeling.