Fashion Industry

History

To give a short history of the fashion industry, one might say that the couturier came into existence out of the necessity to create signs of distinction for those who wanted to display their dominant status. As more people entered the middle class and as technology and industry advanced to allow clothing to be manufactured at lower prices, manufacturers provided fashionable clothing to a wider audience. By the early twentieth century, industrial clothing manufacture gave way to more fashionable mass-produced ready-to-wear clothing industry. As the twentieth century progressed, fashion became a major cultural force. While American fashion has to an extent followed its own more democratic trajectory, by the 1960s, Paris was no longer the only acknowledged arbiter of fashion, nor was the sole referent the upper-class woman for whom the couturier designed. In the past, creation was synonymous with luxury and with the vision of a couturier, and fashion was largely confined to the upper echelons of society. Industrial clothing intended for the masses lacked the aesthetic properties, and the immediacy, that would qualify it as fashion. One could argue that the fashion designer, as opposed to the more exclusive couturier, came into

existence when enough people had the means to purchase markers of elite status, and as Jean Baudrillard says, signs began to become detached from their reference points, that is, a fundamental reality or a definite order. Whereas in the past fashion was principally a means of conveying one's social status (authority, wealth, gender) and the social expectations around these statuses, as signs became commodified, individuals could more freely use these signs for their own purposes: to display real or imagined social status; to express ideals, an oppositional stance, sexual desirability, spirituality, and personality. These attributes can be split into many subcategories. Yves Saint Laurent expresses a different type of sexuality than Abercrombie and Fitch. These archetypes themselves change within firms, and over time, and certainly from one season to the next—or with the release of a new line of clothing. This happens just as the mythologies of a culture (let us say, on what constitutes sexual attractiveness) become less cohesive—unhinged as they are from a central logic or common morality. Consumers too are able to creatively construct an appearance, further diluting any message that a given designer may intend to convey.

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