I have been concerned with definitions and terminologies and want to ensure I am always researching ‘fashion media’. This piece of text really reaffirmed my ideas of what constitutes as fashion and dress. Lucy gave me this reference and it has really helped me link my interest of the body with fashion – DRESS! I am interested in ways of presentation and representation through fashion, adornment, dress, alteration etc, so the body is central to my work.
- ‘As we address the problems of classifying types of dress, we recognise that the dressed person is a gestalt that includes body, all direct modifications of the body itself, and all three-dimensional supplements added to it…. Direct modifications of the body as well as the supplements added to it must be considered types of dress because they are equally effective means of human communication, and because similar meanings can be conveyed by some property, or combination of properties, of either modifications or supplements.’ – definition and classification of dress
- ‘The use of the term ‘appearance’ as a category that subsumes various typed of dress also has its limitations. In some ways appearance is more than dress and in other ways less. It is more than dress because it takes into account body features, movements, and positions, as well as the visible body modifications and supplements of dress. It is less than dress because it leaves out what may be some of the most intimately apprehended properties of dress, that is, touch, odor, taste, and sound.’
- ‘When classifiers label a type of dress or some aspect of it as ornament, adornment, or decoration, they are clearly making a value judgment regarding its merits as an aesthetically pleasing creation, Similarly, their calling a type of dress a mutilation or deformation indicates they have judged it to be non acceptable.’
- ‘An additional term that is popular in current literature, but difficult to interpret, is “physical appearance”. Some writers use the term to indicate qualities of the natural body, others to identify characteristics of the body and any direct body modifications”.
- ‘Supplements to the body – such as body enclosures, attachments to the body, attachments to body enclosures, attachments to the body, and hand-held accessories – can be cross-classified with the same properties used to describe body modifications.’
- The definition of dress and the classification system we present unites two major human acts (modifying the body and supplementing the body) that invite sensory responses to and interpretations of the resulting outward similarities and differences of human beings.
- Like the term “cosemetic surgery,” they involve and emphasize the dual functions of dress: as a means of communication between human beings and as an alterant of body processes.’