The Empire Of Fashion Summary

556 Words2 Pages

The articles and the images relate to other reading in the course because it acknowledges that fashion is a broad subject and fashion marketing/ advertising has allowed fashion to stretch from many borders around the world. Fashion encourages everyone to dress in a certain manner; simultaneously it is about a search for individuality and expression. In The Empire of Fashion, Gilles Lipovetsky mentions the significance of advertising for haute couturiers in the nineteenth century. It was a form of individualism and self-expression; it is the beginning of advertising. Similar to Marketing Fashion and Fashion Marketing, these articles discuss different forms of fashion diffusion and its impacts on the consumers and followers of fashion. The articles …show more content…

In The Empire of Fashion, Lipovetsky traces the effect of Fashion on the practice of democracy in Western Europe. Specifically, fashion and haute couture led to the development of democratic values and encouraged individuals to believe in self-expression. Lipovetsky frames his argument through a historical lens, examining how the dissemination of fashion into the other estates led to personal expression and democracy. By using politics, Lipovetsky argues that the political organization in France, during the fourteenth century, encouraged the bourgeoisie to seek individuality and freedom. On the other hand, Burns argues it is impossible to fashion to promote individualism because each individual is mimicking/imitating another person. Essentially, to Burns, fashion diffused into the lower classes because individuals tend to wear clothing consistent with their social class and the lower class continued to take patterns and ideas from the upper class to be like them. In other words, fashion is individuals referring to the styles of a reference group that they desire to be; fashion would not exist if lower classes did not aspire to live like the upper class and mimic their styles, accessories and

Open Document