Craft and Culture, Changing the Global Dialog of Fashion

"Fashion content has in recent years become an open access for all to comment and contribute, becoming a language of ambiguity, fixed in rigid social and cultural roles. For many years now, it has been described by many theorists, sociologists as a complex language.
With recent advancements, we need to acknowledge the changes surrounding the language of fashion in a global interactive context. The vast majority experience fashion today is through a screen, as we scroll on social media, encountering endless global information. We have shifted from glossy magazine images, taken by professional photographers where supermodels pose while being styled, edited and retouched versus the supposedly candid snapshots of popular influencers we find on social media, that share experiences of fabricated lives, overuse hash-tagging labels and finished with love heart emojis. Do values start to shift or become lost in translation where garments are being translated from a foreign perspective and it’s meanings?

We accept that fashion is a complex system of ambiguities and even more with the developments in media technologies, fast fashion, and consumerism on the rise has created a new generation of fashion storytellers, image-makers, and curators that produce and share a pastiche of perspectives. These communicators provided the world with uninterrupted white noise, highlighting the discourse of fashion language and its many shifting values. The intent of fashion is two-fold: both informative and communicative. An audience must know what the communicator means to convey where garments are being translated from foreign perspectives and meanings something. Society needs to question the aspect of communication in these times of change, keeping in mind it is not relied upon being fully understood. In the East, we look to the West to be informed and attempt to translate the creativity into a language that we do not fully grasp, re-communicating it as a foreigner. With this research, I aim to examine the power of social media influence on fashion and how it is generating a disjuncts fashion language, the loss of knowledge and heritage across time and space, subsequently creating a local voice through craft and culture changing the global dialog of fashion."    
Citation:
Bonney, Martin. “Craft and Culture, Changing the Global Dialog of Fashion.” Fashion Futures Conference Proceedings, edited by Li Jun, Donghua University, pp. 362–370.