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January 19, 2007
S07 Fortune cookie #2—on fashion(able) criticism
After a couple hours up-down Main Street sampling the weave of swag and branding and "gifting," this small thought: Fashion criticism often falls victim to fashion’s function in socializing and 
acculturation. If fashion bears the dual roles of self-expression and social registration, its criticism is inevitably a cultural criticism, addressing the abstract and applied terms of dress and appearance as a reflection of self-expression and self-confidence, but also implicating the terms of dress within the social contract. Fashion as a consumerist system exerts prodigious power; society, the entirety of our small and large social constructs, wields a like power over each client and potential purchaser… We expect fashion to be superficial, possessing beauty only in the limited category of craft/dazzle; we assume that fashion’s timely brevity is the soul of witlessness. (Richard Martin, “Addressing the Dress,” from “The Crisis of Criticism” (1998).)
Posted by Ray Pride at January 19, 2007 04:35 PM
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