Culture can be better
After seeing John Lau’s lecture on culture. I became very intrigued by the way fashion interact with larger cultures. Culture exists as a collection of ‘ideas, customs and social behaviours’, and thus it influences our ‘values, actions, and expectations of ourselves’, John said. So thus throughout history and different cultures, we see people donning dresses that reflects their respective statuses, needs, and era. I see that fashion grows accordingly to the things happening around different cultures — society, politics, and beliefs. Thus, certain appearances have been made to be associated with certain occupations or beliefs, like how John exemplified the politician look epitomised by Margaret Thatcher. It seems then, to me, that fashion is born to be the embodiment of culture — we assign certain semantics to certain aesthetics. However, this practice brings repercussions that have always baffled me. In our age of globalisation with bursting grow in diversity, we often see talks of cultural appropriation versus appreciation in fashion. And people tend to quickly get angry when bits get borrowed from a culture appear in a garment, or when put onto a person of a different culture. Certain subjects in many culture become isolated, and I feel like they become reserved exclusively for current members of each particular culture. John made a point talking about fashion items that might have infringed on the cultural significance of other cultures, such as the blackface inspired sweater, saying that it is bad designing, in which the design fails no acknowledge the meaning of the aesthetics. I understand this point, but I also think that when we restrict the use of aesthetics that are associated with worse things in history, such as slavery, religions…etc, we turn them into taboos. And I feel it is an extreme way of assessing fashion during our strive for globalisation and diversity. We should not have to get angry when we see Justin Bieber with dreadlocks, or when John Galliano run a Japanese inspired runway. Just because certain looks are bonded with ugly things from the past, doesn’t mean we should bury it away, especially when we very much make the better out of it.
Reference:
Lau, J. (2020) ‘ Cultural Sustainability’ [Lecture]. Better Lives, London College of Fashion, 18 February.
10th May 2020 @ 6:15 pm
Culture can be better – Peer review
I decided to review Vu Tran’s first blog post, Culture can be better (https://1920betterlivessmc.myblog.arts.ac.uk/2020/03/09/culture-can-be-better/). Culture can be better is inspired by John Lau’s lecture Cultural Sustainability, that I had also discussed in my first blog post, Cultural competence in a globalised society; therefore, I thought it could be interesting to see if Vu and I had reached similar conclusions.
In his post, Vu reflects first on the relationship between fashion and culture, and then on the touchy debate between cultural appropriation vs. cultural appreciation. After attending John Lau’s lecture and becoming intrigued by the relationship between fashion and larger cultures, Vu reaches the conclusion that “fashion is born to be the embodiment of culture”, and that “we assign certain semantics to certain aesthetics”. In other words, Lau taught us that, throughout history, people have always expressed important aspects of their identity -status, wealth, social background- through clothes. Fashion, by embodying culture, becomes the zeitgeist of an era. Other times, certain clothes or styles become staples for certain categories of people; Vu quotes the example used by Lau: Margaret Thatcher’s style that has, since her mandate, became the “woman in politics look”. After these considerations, he moves on to his next point: how, even in the age of globalization, “people tend to quickly get angry when bits borrowed from a culture appear in a garment, or when put onto a person of a different culture”. He makes various examples, like Justin Bieber’s dreadlocks, the infamous Gucci blackface turtleneck and John Galliano’s Japanese inspired collection. He then concludes by arguing that “Just because certain looks are bonded with ugly things from the past, doesn’t mean we should bury it away, especially when we very much make the better out of it”.
Overall, I think Vu engaged well with the Better Lives themes. The lecture he chose to discuss provided a good starting point for discussing diversity, sustainability and social responsibility. He presented an opinion on social responsibility that can be defined as “unpopular”, and linked it to the lecture: while Lau warned us of the risk of offensive, lazy design, Vu argues that, when we strive for true diversity and acceptance, garments and subjects shouldn’t be made exclusive only to members of specific cultures. This point Vu makes is also linked to the theme of diversity: according to him, true diversity and acceptance can only be achieved when we stop turning looks from different cultures into “taboos”. When it comes to sustainability, Lau linked it to the issues of culture, globalization, diversity and misrepresentation. I think Vu interacted well with these themes, and provided a controversial point of view in relation to them.
It turns out that me and Vu did not reach the same conclusions after all, but that’s not what this blog post was aiming to discuss: my focus was on Vu’s interaction with the Better Lives themes, and it seems to me that he engaged with them in a critical and complete way.