Critical analysis post critical design
Better Lives
What is individuality within a society conditioned by popular consensus. While fashion has become a more diverse scene the prominence of a hierarchy that brainwashes through social conditioning is more powerful and more relevant than ever. In western culture, we are constantly subjected to the ideas of others and appropriating them as our own, from social media influencers to artists. Social media makes it easier to stereotype an idea into a commercial product, we feel the need to conform to this and validate our own insecurities. Ideas have become a source of currency and the value attached to that currency is the success defined by social media recognition, in terms or likes views and shares. Never has the adage “any publicity is good publicity” been so apt. Social media encourages us to value a social hierarchy by manipulating our anxiety attached to media recognition in apps like Instagram. Entire departments of social media brands are devoted to finding ways to increase our spending times within each app while competing with other big media to monopolise our free time. The biproduct of competitive businesses manipulating our anxiety to create a dependency on social media is the reinforcement of a superficial need to adhere to out our own popular consensus. By enabling large platforms to tell people what to think, we respond in the same way act in the same way. Similar to how a person can find comfort in being told what to do, we can find comfort in being told what to do and how to act. The more common what were told to do is, the more we feel it is correct and the more comfortable we feel. Fashion through social media, creates faster trends, faster fashion and faster styles. Recycled and reused ideas. By adhering to popular fashion the more comfortable we feel. This is where my personal problem with fashion in the age of social media occurs. We create an equal platform that allows for universal expression and criticism. However, we validate expression by recycling it and killing the individuality that made it important and human. While rejecting critique of popular consensus because it challenges our comfort, within a conditioned society that relies on social media for both anxiety and comfort, social medial becomes a comfort zone and addiction at the same time. To fully appreciate the boundaries of individuality in fashion we would have to reject our own addiction and accept critique. Which will never be as appealing as aiming for validation and the temptation of manipulating the power of a popular consensus. It is human nature to conform, to conform to a popular consensus, to fit in.
Is it possible to define the success of a piece of art without the need for a popular consensus?