fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #4495 ]

[ SECRET POST #4495 ]

⌈ Secret Post #4495 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 00 pages, 00 secrets from Secret Submission Post #644.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
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I have so many issues with the fashion industry. I get that it is an art form and that designers are artists. But at the same time, they are designing clothes for actual people to wear. And yet so often fashion is just treated like art and like the person who wears them is merely the canvas the designer uses to display their art.

It comes out a lot in how designers so often design for only a small range of sizes. And how they complain if having to design for women who aren't model size. But it comes out in a lot of other ways too. And it isn't just about size discrimination. And I think a lot of commentary on sizism in fashion misses the bigger picture of treating women's bodies as canvases and of designers forgetting they are designing for actual people.

they are designing clothes for actual people to wear

Wrong. They're not designing clothes for actual people to wear. They're designing clothes for models and celebrities to wear so that everyone else will buy their sunglasses and belts and coin purses. Because that's all actual people can afford, and that's all the designers actually sell.

Okay, but, celebrities and models are still people too. They are still human beings, not canvases. And the fact that in general clothes are designed with models in mind rather than the everyday person is a big problem.

They vast majority of clothing is designed for the everyday person. Banana Republic does not put on a traditional runway show. J. Crew does not dress celebrities. I'm laughing at the idea of Adele being caught dead in Torrid.

Couture and high-end RTW is designed for models and celebrities - i.e., human beings with personal cooks and trainers and aestheticians and surgeons and stylists and a whole team of people working to make them into the perfect canvas, as is required by their job description. I don't see the problem. When you're talking about a $3,300 jacket or a $900 pair of jeans, it seems a little ridiculous to frame it in terms of size inclusivity. Exclusivity in general is the entire point, hence the price tag. And exclusivity is what allows high-end designers to create impractical and artistic pieces instead of the yoga pants and hoodies and cheap polyester separates that most people live in and, indeed, seem to prefer to the highly tailored, structured, unconventional, and quickly dated garments produced by high-end designers.

I have a problem with the general idea of creating "impractical and artistic pieces" for people to wear, whoever those people are. Clothes are things to be worn. Bodies are not canvases. You want to make something that is just an art piece or first an art piece before anything else, make it. Just don't make it and then tell somebody to put it on their body to display it for you.

SA

And if you're going to ask who it hurts, the commodification of women's bodies is a problem, and fashion absolutely plays a huge role in that. Clothes should be clothes, and anything else plays into the idea that women's bodies are themselves art there to be consumed.

Why can't they have different functions for different people or situations? Art is just a means of expression and bodies can express plenty.

See the other comment I said about women's bodies being treated as being a thing for public consumption. Treating fashion as art only or art first rather than as clothes first and then art second contributes to the way women and their bodies are viewed by society.

Why can't clothes be art? Are you angry at fiberartists and cosplayers, too? If bodies are not canvases, why have people ever gotten tattoos or scarification or piercings, or worn makeup or body paint or jewelry, or styled their hair or, you know, given a shit about what they wear even if they don't care about fashion? I don't approve of the human canvas always being a certain body type or plus-size being dismissed as "too hard" but the human body is definitely a canvas and clothes can definitely be art.

Food is meant to be eaten and provide nutritional sustenance but that doesn't mean no one can ever get fancy with it, even if the result is not an optimally nutritionally balanced meal.

Someone using their own body as art and someone using someone else's body as just a form to put their art on are two completely different things. One is someone claiming their own body. The other is someone else using someone else's body and not even caring about the body or person except so far as it can be used to show off the artist's art.

That's an awful lot of assumptions about designer/model relationships that's also incredibly dehumanizing to models who work in it.

My issue isn't with women enjoying and wearing fashion. My issue is with fashion treating women as just a body to put their art on. Fashion de-humanizes women, and that's what bothers me.

I’m none of the anons in this thread and my only experiences with fashion/tailoring were a couple college courses and sewing my own cosplay. I’m also shorter than petite clothes are designed for and my BMI is 30. High fashion treats both women and men as animate clothes hangers. Society in general does commodify women’s bodies and treat us like shit if we don’t fit a very narrow ideal, but runway models all look pretty much like attenuated elves, whether or not they’re female.

you and other anon are arguing two different scenarios which are both true at the same time. you're looking at it with a touch of Project Runway, where the designers are designing wearable clothing for real people and yet balk at the idea of designing for someone with 38-34-45 measurements. when it comes to off-the-rack (not "designer") clothing, yes, the fashion industry is shit and there's so much wrong with it that I don't even know where to begin. when Tim Gunn bitches out the industry for not thinking of real people you know something is wrong.

but the actual couture sphere, the Milan runways and the designs for rich celebrities who have nothing better to do with their lives than preen for cameras, that's kind of a different thing. It's entirely impractical, but it's a sphere that has created itself and sustains itself and really has no bearing on day to day off the rack clothing. real people have not exactly adapted runway couture to their daily lives for at least fifty or sixty years now. the further away we get from "Donna Karen dress turned into patterns which housewives make for themselves for dinner parties" the more the couture/art side has completely diverged from regular consumers. It's still kind of dumb in the way that sculpted cakes which waste perfectly good cake are dumb, but at least they keep that shit in their own bubble over there and it actually has very little to do with how terrible day-wear off-the-rack clothing is.

There's a difference between clothes and cake, though. People don't wear cake. And regardless of whether contour is intended to be worn by the average person, its existence contributes to the idea of women's bodies as a thing to consume. They should make pretty things and not put them on people. By making their art as clothes they then have a responsibility to consider the person wearing what they've made.

DA
Huh?

I guess everyone better stop wearing clothes them if they're about "consuming the body." "They should make pretty things and not put them on people." As a designer, making pretty things and putting them on people is kind of the point.

The female body and clothes have nothing to do with the concept that "the female body is meant to be consumed by males" aka the male gaze. Fashion history has plenty of examples from corsets to hoop skirts to short hair that women love and men hated and women used fashion as a form of control!

I think you're both missing the point of haute couture. Haute couture exists as a place for designers to experiment. Every designer works an experimental piece into their collection. It's the launch point for their work and only top "fashion leader" buyers are going to buy it. Haute Couture is like that for the entire fashion House. It inspires all the collections down to bridge wear. In the strict world of target market fashion design, yes, haute couture is the one place that high end designers can get "artsy."

When your translating those looks down to a price point and so many types of garments and having to hit target sewing times and specific prices, having an "arty, I can do whatever I want" is freeing.

Look, I get fashion isn't like a painting. Haute couture still has artistic value for those designers and other fashion designers and artistic creators as inspiration.

or whatever lmao actually thanks for providing a fashion pov. I'm a tailor, so basically I make bank fixing the results of ready to wear clothing on "real" people. I only know some of what goes on in the design phase - enough to get by but not enough to be an expert. I know much more about patterns than I do design.

You're right, though, actual couture is where designers experiment and may come up with the next defining trend. There is a difference between that and the Met Gala art pieces. But the original anon equating Met Gala level art design to what ends up in stores was basically apples to oranges. There's a place for both, but to blame the result (off the rack clothing) on an unrelated cause (artsy designs) is what prompted me to step in.

Fashion people have issues with the fashion industry. -waves- I didn't go to Parsons. I went to the Academy of Art where fashion was taught "as a business." Art didn't play a big role in how we were supposed to think about clothes. What did play a big role was one very specific price point, Runway Ready to Wear. And other places, like Parsons and FIT are as far as I'm aware, pretty much the same w/ stricter standards.

The fashion student is taught essentially one way to draw. 9 Heads, inverted triangle body type. This creates a "hangar" for the clothes to be on. Even though we're told in fashion business size 12 is the average American woman, we're taught to draft size 8. Models can be size 4 or 6. The average American woman is now a size 14. In drafting, we also aren't taught how to scale the sizes up or down. Thus, a student designer doesn't know how to do the niche plus sized market when it comes to drawing, designing or drafting. It's not in their tool box.

Fashion, for the properly taught designer, is only "art" if they are doing haute couture avante garde work that is supposed to be "wearable art" that say gets worn to the Met Gala. Otherwise, they have a design aesthetic/brand, a target market, fashion TRENDS and a specific price point per garment to meet.

When it comes to making a brand, they have to make a choice on where they are starting. So most start with Missy sized clothes. Then, if your brand gets popular enough, you can expand to Petite/Plus Sized/Shoes etc. Missy sized clothes are the CHEAPEST place to start a brand. It's all business, not art.

So that means the petite, tall and plus sized markets are incredibly under served. Because the patterns have to be remade correctly to fit them properly and this costs because there's about 12 people in the States that have that skill. That's why a lot of clothes that are designed for Missy look bad in Plus Size b/c the pattern was NOT scaled properly up.

Then fashion gets spread out trying to fix all these problems like fashion waste and too thin models all at once. So, nothing really gets resolved. (We have made strides. Go France!)

I know exactly why you made this comment. The reason you're talking about is the reason why shows like Project Runway have pushed so hard for plus sized models and out of ten of them, there are only 2. TWO! They're trying to bring awareness to this issue. They're succeeding. Hopefully soon there will be some better if incremental changes to the industry.

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[ SECRET POST #4495 ]

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