Dress, Fashion, and Social Develop

fashon2day

Dress has been defined as the total arrangement of all outwardly detectable modifications of the body itself and all material objects added to it. In other words, dress includes not only clothing, but all accessories, hairstyles, and any other alterations made to the body, temporary or otherwise.

Cloth is Useful for our Nature,Fashion,Design Ext..

Dress is an important feature of all human societies.. In addition to the obvious function of providing protection and warmth, dress serves many other purposes, most of them having to do with communicating our identity to others. Indeed protection and warmth may not have been the earliest purpose of dress. Many people have always lived in warm climates where clothing is not needed for protection from the elements, yet they have developed forms of dress.

Modesty is another commonly cited purpose for dress. Yet the definition of modesty varies greatly from place to place, and even in the same locality, over the course of time. In Muslim cultures, for example, both men and women cover most of the body in public, as do people in many other times and places. However, in other times and places exposure of various parts of the body may not be a concern.

Beauty/ seduction are also important purposes of dress. Most people want to look attractive, at least under certain circumstances. But what is considered beautiful is also subject to variation. Ideals of beauty also change over time within the same culture, as we will see. 

Status or Identification with one's social group is clearly a very important purpose of dress. Through our dress we all signal our affiliation with a social group: this is true whether your group is a Mayan village in Guatemala, or undergraduate students at Cornell.

Ceremony or ritual may be the purpose of certain specialized forms of dress reserved for certain occasions or people; such as wedding attire, or liturgical dress.

 

Fashion or style is another purpose that drives dress in some cultures. Fashion is a process by which the
accepted form of dress is transformed. Mass fashion as it is has been termed in industrialized societies is transformed for reasons that are basically economic. Mass fashion is driven by a manufacturing and distribution system that is motivated to promote frequent changes in styles- that is, frequent changes in the definition of what kinds of dress are beautiful, or confer the desired status or group identity. Since many of the new ideas for mass fashion these days are drawn from the street, even those who profess to be "anti-fashion" are subjected to the pressure to innovate, if they wish to wear styles that remain distinguishable from the main stream