The first time I participated in anything artistic, was when I learned how to play the piano at 5 years old. I wish I could say I was one of those music prodigies that love music at first play, but I hated it. I hated practicing, I hated the sound, and I hated my teacher, at least any teacher that could handle me for more than a month. It wasn’t until I was about 12 years old that I realized how beautiful music could be. Lucky for me, my mom was able to put up with my whining and complaining and made a strict rule that I couldn’t quit piano lessons until I was 18 years old. I learned to love art so much that I participated in it as much as I could. I took classes like band, photography, painting, and even ceramics that helped me expand my understanding of the subject. An act of art that had never crossed my mind was fashion.
Fashion had never been my cup of tea, I wore anything as long as it covered, I hate make up and use as less of it as possible, and any fashion runway show I had seen, looked completely ridiculous. I didn’t think of it as art but as a way to sell odd clothing for the rich and famous. My brother, on the other hand, lived for fashion. I figured he was just young and naïve, not realizing that fashion was just Hollywood and was over exaggerated by the media. My brother is a great artist, one of the best I know. It made me almost annoyed that he could do much greater things with his drawings than with his small fling into fashion.
When I asked my brother where he got some of his inspiration to stick up for fashion and to pursue, he said that a lot of it strangely came from the pop singer, Lady Gaga. Most people, including me, put up a barrier if we mention the strange pop singer, especially when it came to her fashion. But my brother pointed out even some of her lyrics that pointed out her individuality. Some specific lyrics he showed me from one of her most famous songs, says, “No matter gay, straight, or bi, lesbian, transgendered life…I was born to survive. No matter black, white or beige cola or orient made…I was born to be brave.” My brother felt that even though he was made fun of for liking fashion, it expressed who he is and he could express who he was through it, just like art. He helped me realize that his love for fashion was just as equal to my love for music. I could be who I wanted to be and I wouldn’t back down if anyone tried to change my mind about it.
My brother used to watch a show called “Ugly Betty”, it’s a comedy show about a girl that decides to work in the fashion industry, despite the fact that she doesn’t fit in the fashion world. My brother found his so called “mission” in that show. Though he was never considered an ugly type, he wanted the TV show to be his reality. Whenever my brother tried to show me his reasons for wanted to continue in the fashion industry, I just ignored him. It seemed like the only information he had about fashion was from Hollywood.
To me, fashion was never an art. I just found it as an erotic excuse to sell clothing. Marc Jacobs, a very famous designer once said “Fashion to me is not art because it is only valid if it is lived in and worn. I make clothes and bags and shoes for people to use, not to put up on a wall and look at. I think clothes in a museum are complete death. I have seen exhibitions of the clothes of Jackie Kennedy and I am not interested in her wardrobe. I am interested in the life and the women who wore those clothes.”
In the past, I agreed with Marc. He mentions that putting pieces of clothing up in a museum, made by or worn by famous designers, is death and completely pointless. Over the summer, I went to New York City with my family and waited five hours in line to see the Alexander McQueen exhibit. I had never seen anything more brilliant and simply beautiful. It helped me get an inside on the fashion life and also the brilliant mind of one of today’s greater artists. Though Marc Jacobs probably knows fashion much more than I do, I believe he’s wrong. Believing the fact that a piece of clothing is worthless unless worn and used is almost naïve. In a piece of music, there’s a difference in playing the notes and actually playing the music. Marc may be a rich and famous designer, but he’s making the designs for societies impute and not for his own.
Fashion and art should create something beautiful in their audience or in the artist themselves. Great art makes another feel what the artist was trying to convey. Alice Rawsthorn, the director of the Design Museum once said “Quibbling over whether fashion is more or less important than art is just as pointless as questioning whether or not it is art. Of course it’s not, it’s fashion. That is not to say that fashion, at its best, is not a suitable subject for museums or that it cannot share some of the attributes of art. Only an old-fashioned aesthete would argue that the role of the artist is to create beauty. Sometimes artists do, but for most of them beauty tends to be a by-product of their quest to explore the complex, messy, ambiguities of modern life. Unlike art, fashion rarely expresses more than the headlines of history. And fashion has a practical purpose, whereas art does not. The result may be as gorgeous as a vintage Balenciaga ball gown or an eloquent political metaphor for its time, but it is still an item of clothing intended to be worn. Why pretend that it is anything else?”
Alice makes a clear point that fashion is on it’s own and shouldn’t be considered as art. I now believe that fashion is its own subject, but a subject within the arts. She also states that fashion rarely expresses headline of history, depending on the designer, just like an artist, they can express any feeling, any story, any history. The purpose of art is for an artist to show his/her audience what new emotion they can bring to the stage, as well as fashion.
One thing that I had always loved about art, especially in music, is that though there are rules. The rules are breakable and can easily be made into your own. A Wall Street Journal journalist named Virginia Postrel once wrote an article about fashion being an art in 2010. “In its broadest and deepest meaning, fashion specifies no medium. It refers to any aesthetic change for its own sake. Painting and sculpture reflect changing fashions. So do music and dance, poetry and prose” Just like any other art form, fashion holds no limitations and lets one express themselves without anything holding them back.
Fashion, can at times, be a braver art, in the fact that society does judge more on appearance than anything else. The way we dress is limited by society, but fashion expands the cultural mind and, at times, can blow society away. Virginia also mentions “fashion is one of the faces of modern artifice, of the effort of human beings to make themselves masters of the conditions of their own existence.” Fashion allows individuals to create public images for themselves and to enjoy the pleasures of imagining those images. Against both custom and classicism, fashion reminds us that the pleasure of novelty is a human universal; both served and intensified by modern commercial culture.
Virginia’s article on fashion is practically dead on when it comes to my thoughts on fashion today. In the past, I never regarded fashion in my day-to-day life, but slowly I learned that everyone is influenced by fashion everyday. A strange but sure source that I love is the movie called “The Devil Wears Prada”. The main character, Andy, gets a job in the fashion industry but doesn’t belong; just like my brothers favorite show “Ugly Betty”. The movie is based off the real life editor and chief of Runway magazines. In one of Andy’s embarrassing moments, mentioning she’s still getting used to this “stuff”, the editor and chief says “This… stuff’? Oh. Okay. I see. You think this has nothing to do with you. You go to your closet and you select… I don’t know… that lumpy blue sweater, for instance because you’re trying to tell the world that you take yourself too seriously to care about what you put on your back. But what you don’t know is that that sweater is not just blue, it’s not turquoise. It’s not lapis. It’s actually cerulean. And you’re also blithely unaware of the fact that in 2002, Oscar de la Renta did a collection of cerulean gowns. And then I think it was Yves Saint Laurent who showed cerulean military jackets. And then cerulean quickly showed up in the collections of eight different designers. And then it, uh, filtered down through the department stores and then trickled on down into some tragic Casual Corner where you, no doubt, fished it out of some clearance bin. However, that blue represents millions of dollars and countless jobs and it’s sort of comical how you think that you’ve made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact, you’re wearing the sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room from a pile of stuff.”
Though from a movie, the editor and chief made it clear to me that just by wearing clothing everyday, we are part of the fashion industry. We may not be on the runway with the models, but everything society is and wears today, is inspired by runway fashion. The fashion industry shapes society and tells us how we should look today.
It wasn’t until this summer that I fully converted to that fact that fashion was art. When me and my family visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City and waited in line to see the Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty exhibit, I didn’t know anything about the man, only that my brother mourned his suicidal death in 2010. By this time, I loved showing an interest in fashion to support my brother, but for that reason alone.
When we finally got to walk through the exhibit, my mind was blown away. The man was utterly brilliant in the way he used clothing to evoke what we are as humans.
In each of the sections of the exhibit, it had an explanation on the wall in his words about the clothing. He explained that “My collections have always been autobiographical, a lot to do with my own sexuality and coming to terms with the person I am – it was like exorcising my ghosts in the collections. They were to do with my childhood, the way I think about life and the way I was brought up to think about life.” Alexander McQueen made me realize, that just like I had been doing with music for so long, he was doing with fashion. He conveyed his clothing into his own mind, and he didn’t care what others thought. “People find my things sometimes aggressive. But I don’t see it as aggressive. I see it as romantic dealing with a dark side of personality. I’m about what goes through peoples minds, the stuff that people don’t want to admit or face up to. The shows are about what’s buried in people’s psyches.”
Like a real artist, McQueen showed his own mind through his shows, but also showed the world what they were all afraid to see. McQueen made me realize that I had built a wall around my own artistic world, when yet there was much more to be seen. I had closed my mind to new things, and he, and others, were handing them to me everyday.
Fashion changed my perspective of art for the better. It expanded my thoughts and my mind about the world and really who I am. My brother helped me change my perspective by putting up with my constant judging and stereotypical thoughts of fashion. Witnessing the Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty exhibit was worth the six-hour wait, to better help me with my understanding in the arts. Fashion is what the world is today and what we are too afraid to sometimes accept. Fashion, just like art, can make a person think and show them some of the beautiful things in life.