The Role of Fashion in Human Culture

In these exclusive interviews, we speak to Claudia Schiffer (a globally renowned model, iconandbusinesswoman), Robin Givhan (Pulitzer Prize winning fashion writer and former special correspondent for Newsweek/Daily Beast) and Dov Charney (CEO and Founder of American Apparel). We discuss the very fundamental questions of ‘what’ fashion is, and how it has become such an important part of human culture and identity. Digging deeper, we also look at issues ranging from brand, to sexuality and even the business of fashion itself.

In her essay ‘Addressing the Body’; Joanne Entwistle interprets this assertion to suggest that our bodies constitute our environment, making them inseparable from self. She also identifies Turner’s obvious and prominent omission: noting that human bodies are dressed bodies. “Nakedness…” she writes, “…is wholly inappropriate in almost all social situations and, even in situations where much naked flesh is exposed (on the beach, at the swimming-pool, even in the bedroom), the bodies that meet there are likely to be adorned, if only by jewellery, or indeed, even perfume: when asked what she wore to bed, Marilyn Monroe claimed that she wore only Chanel No. 5, illustrating how the body, even without garments, can still be adorned or embellished in some way. Dress is a basic fact of social life and this, according to anthropologists, is true of all known human cultures: all people ‘dress’ the body in some way, be it through clothing, tattooing, cosmetics or other forms of body painting. To put it another way, no culture leaves the body unadorned but adds to, embellishes, enhances or decorates the body… Dress is the way in which individuals learn to live in their bodies and feel at home in them.” As Roland Barthesonce stated, “…Clothing concerns all of the human person, all of the body, all of the relationships of man to body as well as the relationships of the body to society…”

The cultural manifestation of this need to ‘dress’ is better known as fashion; which Lars Svendsen (in his book ‘Fashion as a Philosophy’) describes as being “…one of the most influential phenomena in Western civilisation since the renaissance.” Svendsen notes that fashion has “…conquered an increasing number of modern man’s fields of activity and has become almost ‘second nature’…” The logic of fashion he states, “…also encroaches on the areas of art, politics and science, [making it] clear that we are talking about a phenomenon that lies near the centre of the modern world.”

This profound role in human culture has created a giant. The global fashion industry is conservatively estimated to be worth over US$1.3 Trillion (around 2% of the value of the world economy). To put that in context, the global pharmaceutical industry (supplying all the medicines in the world) is just over half that in size (at US$880 billion). Fashion is therefore, “…one of the crowning achievements of western civilization or it is incontrovertible evidence of consumers culture’s witless obsession with the trivial and the unreal. It is either creative to the point of being an ‘art’, enabling individuals and cultures to express their inner feelings and personalities, or it is exploitative to the point of criminality, forcing people to work and spend more than is healthy for them or society…” (Kurt W. Back, ‘Modernism and Fashion’)

So what is the true impact of fashion in human culture?

In these exclusive interviews, we speak to Claudia Schiffer (a globally renowned model, icon and businesswoman), Robin Givhan(Pulitzer Prize winning fashion writer and special correspondent for Newsweek/Daily Beast) and Dov Charney (CEO and Founder of American Apparel). We discuss the very fundamental questions of ‘what’ fashion is, and how it has become such an important part of human culture and identity. Digging deeper, we also look at issues ranging from brand, to sexuality and even the business of fashion itself.