The sociology of fashion: both an idea and ideal

Fashion that can be defined initially as the social systemic production, consumption and institutionalization of novelty is a cultural phenomenon that integrates culture, the individual and the economy.

Yet it finds expression materially and visually in forms coded by color, shape, texture and branding, and must be produced and circulated within cultural fields integrating local and global systems. Fashion is not just a social process pertaining to clothing and address. It is more of an expressive sensibility favouring individuality, which energizes facets of both economic production and personal consumption.

The sociologist Georg Simmel (1997), writing in a famous essay published over a century ago, pointed out that fashion was not just about clothing styles, but was in fact a basic process that propelled modern life, and in turn its structuring of the psycho-social development of the modern person an example of this would be the invention of the bikini, ‘flapper-girls or Levi jeans.

To quote Simmel: “Fashion represents nothing more than one of the many forms of life by the aid of which we seek to combine . . . the tendency toward social equalization with the desire for individual differentiation and change.”

Entwistle (2000) defines fashion generally as a system of dress found in modernity a social system for encoding the presentation of bodies. From her perspective, fashion is a form of dress that essentially concerns the body how it is presented and dressed, how it performs, and what messages it contains and represents.

The sociology of fashion can be analysed, studied and experience to encompass social trends and changes currently happening or are on the horizon to occur.

Fashion is both an idea and an ideal.

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