You don’t have to be a fashion expert to enjoy fashion. Watching runway shows and collections can be a great hobby and passion.

Many people are really taken by the idea of communicating ideas and notions through clothes but don’t really have a framework on how to go about interpreting and understanding fashion. Experienced essay writers usually work with pre-established structures when they analyze things like fashion or creative projects in general.

Here are some useful notions and structures you may make use of in order to understand fashion better:

 

Context

The context of any creative work is very important. Just by looking around what is going on and trying to place a runway show or a collection in the context will offer you great insight into its role and the reason or reasons why it was created. This may take some time to master, but practice makes perfect – it is not easy to look at the present from the outside.

When you are thinking about context, you should consider things like the political climate, the people involved in the creative process, the audiences they appeal to, the critics, the relation between the creators, the audiences and the critics, etc. You can also consider other factors such as the economy, the role of religion in the context, the current artistic vision and so on. In this sense, you can try to look at things like popular music genres, movies, media, book and other cultural products and see what the red thread is.

Also, when focusing only on fashion, it is of the essence to look at what is happening in fashion now (what others are doing), what happened in the past and what you think may happen in the future (it’s important to remember that you need to focus on what you think will happen, not on what you would like to happen). It’s also important to look at the dynamic between high fashion, conceptual fashion and everyday clothes, as this will help you create a more complete picture.

 

Colors

The significance of colors is something that has become rather common. Most of us know that there are cool and warm colors and that each color is associated with certain ideas, moods or elements. For example, fire is, of course a powerful color, associated with fire, but also with the evening and mysteries.

When analyzing colors it is important to be able to see nuances. In this sense, there are a few terms and concepts that are quite important:

Hue and color mean the same thing and refer to the color family or the basic color of a certain shade. For example, blue is the color root for navy.

A tint is also known as a pastel. It is a color to which white has been added, resulting in a paler version of the root color.

A shade is the opposite of a tint: it refers to any color with black added.

Tones are created by adding both black and white to a color. A color mixed with gray is sometimes called a “grayed down” color. Tones can sometimes be more soothing to the eye as they are not very strong. Some people see them more subtle, complex and sophisticated.

 

Prints

Prints are a very important fashion element, as they are very complex systems of reference. The great thing about prints is that they are helpful in decoding and understanding the message behind an item of clothing. For example, tartan is clearly a reference to classic British values, while a leopard print is a reference to fierceness and animal behavior.

Prints, patterns and all types of textile signage are very useful to analyzing clothes.

 

Materials

The basic element of constructing a clothing item is of course, the material from which it is made. Materials are also really great ways of understanding a piece of clothing. By simply describing the material, one can get a sense of what the intention behind the garment is. Is it soft, thick, harsh, rugged, etc.?

Moreover, the combination of textiles in single items, outfits or collections will help you understand the story.

 

Message

Last, but not least, you should also take the expressed intention into consideration. Sometimes, the obvious idea is just a cover message or just a pretext, so it is important to take it with a grain of salt. Basically, what you should do is start from there and then see if the proposed message makes sense based on all the elements presented so far.

 

 

Additional information

It is important to say that these tools are great to use when analyzing both individual pieces and entire collections. The only difference is that when you are analyzing a collection, you also need to connect the dots between the pieces and the looks.

 

In the end, what also needs to be said is that sometimes, unfortunately, things don’t really have to make sense. Sometimes, collections are just a mish-mash, but this is also interesting because it says a lot about the way people think.

Many times, in fact, more often than you would expect, people communicate things without realizing what these are. This may seem as a bummer, but it is in fact even more fascinating to dabble in the unconscious of the people who are creating clothes and collections.

Clothing and fashion are great tools to understand society and the cultural climate. They are really amazing reflections of what is going on and, very often, they are also a peak into what is going to happen next.

 

 

 

Fraquoh and Franchomme

 

 

 

 

 

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