Fashion is defined as "a popular trend, especially in styles of dress and ornament or manners of behavior," but there is so much more to it than what the definition explains. The items of clothing we chose to wear are often times our most powerful and apparent forms of personal expression. What we choose to wear tells everyone what type of person we are and what we think of ourselves. Fashion shows are an entertaining spectacle unlike any other kind of performance art while boosting the economy and creating jobs for a huge number of people, from the designer who sketches the original concepts, to the outfitter who manufactures the clothing, to the salesperson who sells the garment to us.
There is the undeniable fact that fashion makes life more beautiful than it truly is, by making people look and/or feel more beautiful than they otherwise might. Fashion is one of the art forms that allows people of all genders, races, sizes, backgrounds, walks of life to feel good about themselves and allows them to look their best. There's something incredibly idealistic about fashion in the sense that it visualizes things in the best possible light. But there's also that part of fashion that seeks to challenge social norms of beauty; it wants to change the collective eye and propose new ideas of what beauty can be. Unlike any other art form, the beauty that is often created in fashion is incredibly short lived, it's a moment. At its best, it burns brightly and quickly and can never be duplicated. That ability to change, to constantly renew itself is probably what makes fashion so intriguing to me. I love that you can look at one designer's work within a given period of time and see the change, whether it's blatant and revolutionary or subtle and evolutionary. You can't always appreciate that journey from one thing to the next in other art forms; it's usually only in hindsight that you can see it. As for what fashion is, besides being an extension of personality, or a mood, or a way of expressing inner creativity, it's also a kind of mask fashion provides a sort of transformative quality, the effect that an item of clothing can have on the way people see you and the way you might see yourself is inherently profound. There's something about feeling your best that brings out a confidence in you that you didn't realize you had. Despite how much fashion deals with the surface, it's the effect it has on the way you feel as opposed to the way you look that makes it so amazing in my opinion.
