Lucy Millard U2258004 Fashion Buying and Management Total Word Count: 2714 Introduction to Critical and Contextual Studies To what extent do you agree with the idea that fashion is an elite privilege, and that access to fashion is restricted by access to wealth? In other words, do you need to be rich to be fashionable? Fashion is hard to define. Contrary to defining being wealthy, considering someone as fashionable is now an individual’s personal belief, where it was previously more like a system of conspicuous expressions of wealth. Considering someone as wealthy can define one’s status, but so can being fashionable. The way you dress can represent your interests, beliefs and religion but so can your job, house, and car. The similarities are endless despite being so simultaneously opposite. Historically, access to fashion and to being deemed 'fashionable' has been restricted by wealth. This essay will explore what it means to be wealthy, fashionable, both, or neither, by considering the restrictions which access to wealth place on fashion. The world as an expression is almost constantly influenced by the everchanging processes behind fashion, its systems, its portrayal, and its dissemination; the ways in which it is translated across people and societies can ultimately represent lots of things. Fashion “is the rule of the strong, the law of beauty, attraction and popularity by the suppression of the ugly.” (Von Busch, n.d.). From the revolution in retail of the eighteenth century, through the nineteenth century, and into the twentieth century interlaced with the impacts of individual expression, industry developments, technological advancements, changes in retail, rises in wages and people’s liberty with diminishing the status quo and reasoning as to how fashion in not restricted by access to wealth. Retail is the reasoning for these advancements. Before the fashion world as we now know it, with seasonal change and social media, restriction on dress was due to the lack of advancements in manufacturing, retail, and availability. In the aspect of gaining new clothes, only the elite individuals were easily engaged with fashionable dress. During the 1750s-1788, access to clothing was limited to the elite in society, those with titles, like dukes, royalty, lords, and ladies, therefore creating a divide in how different levels of society dressed in an extreme juxtaposition. The introduction of fashion plates as an advertising strategy, through advancements in printing technologies, targeted appeal. Consumption grew for the first time due to larger populations being able access to monetary wealth and live with disposable incomes. There was an expansion of middle and merchant classes as well as the number of imports increasing and cheap imitation goods due to the advancements in manufacturing plus retail. Despite these factors some was still only eligible for those at the highest point of society, goods consumption was limited to ‘the middling
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