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Fashion Identity And Identity

Decent Essays

Joanne Entwistle recognizes an inconsistent nature of fashion: it “[takes] inspiration from ambivalence and yet [tries] to fix identity in the form of an image or style.” Here, I would interpret ambivalence as identity: no one word or feature can define one’s identity. Fashion function as a powerful means of self-expression—thus, the birth of a famous cliché: “You are what you wear.” The construction of such social identity comprise of multifaceted contexts in which the Self has been influenced by or made of: gender, sex, culture, race, nationality, religion, and the list continues.
Although fashion is intended to function as a form of communication—allowing one to practice freedom of expression and creativity—the lack of agency in the consumers and industry, accompanied by mass consumption and a mass consumer society, allows fashion to easily establish conventional frameworks that restricts self-expression and even alienate some identities. Once a perspective on a certain identity or a group forms a design or an image, the fast pace and mass consumption of fashion imprints the representation as a social standard and reverses the intent of fashion: people fail to use fashion to create their identity, but are governed by this social product to fit into a category.
Today, we live in a postmodern era where we challenge universal beliefs and norms for “heterogeneity, differentiation and difference”: we promote postmodernism’s fundamental values and trends of increasing

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