Can cloth save humans?
It’s quite obvious answer, but of course, cloth has saved humans. In a fragmentary way, people need a cloth to cover a person’s wounds or to heat or cool the body. Cloth is also needed to carry an injured person. Even people sleep and rest on a cloth every day. In conclusion, People have always needed cloth in difficult times.
Furthermore, with the advancement of technology, cloth can protect humans from threats that seem difficult to protect with a cloth such as fire or vacuum. When I gaze at the era these days, I believe that each fashion style is also a way of protection to survive in a harsh society. In other words, we can reveal our status and role and prove ourselves as a member of society through clothes. With proper clothes, we can live naturally assimilated into society. After all, today’s cloth and clothes provide psychological and social protection as well as physical protection. (The fashion industry has achieved remarkable growth as the demand for the latter exploded.)
I repeat, the current fashion design has faithfully carried out the mission of saving people in the above-mentioned meaning. However, at the same time, it has caused fatal and unavoidable side effects. The side effect is that fashion design has developed by considering the other person, not the wearer. This claim may be difficult to accept in a trend that the dress code within the organization is gradually being relaxed or disappearing. However, although you can decide what to wear today., it is difficult to deny the aforementioned claim if you ask yourself whether you are free from other people’s gaze and the implicit rules of society until the decision is made.
At this point, I can insist that fashion design is an area that has been thoroughly developed from the observer’s point of view. The clearest point that distinguishes fashion design from other design areas is that the structure and proportions of the body must inevitably be considered, and a fashion design without a wearer loses the meaning of its existence. Therefore, it is pretty contradictory that fashion design has developed around an observer who can only look at it. Although the human body is a compulsory and unavoidable reality for fashion design, this industry did not take into account the diversity of the body until recently. As a result, the entire industry has followed only the eyes rather than the body. Moreover, while focusing on the exterior in design, there is a clear limit to the design of the interior that is in contact with the human skin.
Of course, there remains an issue that the fashion design must conform to the structure and proportions of the body is also a limitation. As we cannot ignore the problem of the scale and proportions of the body, it may not be as free as the realms of architecture and spatial design where human movement is equally considered. Despite this constraint, we still have to find a way to break through the limits to answer what is next for fashion design. If we compare the limitations of clothes to the aforementioned architecture, the discussion on the scale should be preceded, but the ‘spatial’ of clothes, like architecture, has not been sufficiently discussed. When it comes to clothes, the interior is stopped at how to cover the seam — I would like to compare the seam to a pillar in architecture — as neatly as possible or how to cover the messy seam with lining to avoid people’s eyes. This can be said to be almost all of the interior design of the clothes. In fact, in the 20th century, Issey Miyake devised an A.P.O.C. system that allowed the wearer to participate in the final stage of design, moving away from just looking at clothes. In addition, by using technology, Issey Miyake eliminated seams between fabrics and brought innovation to the interior of clothes. However, despite this achievement, the fashion industry seems unwilling to accept this system.
Expanding the territory is going into the unknown, and the unknown is always accompanied by risks. If we are faced with expanded fashion design, there will be no fashion design as we know it. However, if you ask it is right to settle in the current fashion design, which has already been proven by mass-produced problems, I think it is a risk in itself. Therefore, we can only find a way by changing the way we treat our clothes. Based on the previous story, how about changing the way we look at clothes and treating clothes as another room? In other words, it is to enter a realm freer from the body like architecture. At that stage, we may not be able to say that we wear clothes. I believe the expression that goes into clothes would be more appropriate. Fashion design will be the domain of designing rooms that are easy to attach and move around the clock. This frees us from the past mistakes of trying to fit our body too tightly and even distorting it. Also, you can think about the space between clothes and the body, and like spatial design, you may reach a new area where you can design both the exterior and the interior of clothes.
Such discourses can already found in traditional Eastern clothing. Unlike Western clothing, which has been designed to fit the body and developed patterns to reveal and emphasize the lines of the body, the East has focused on the material itself and focused on the space between the body and clothing, in other words, the blank space of the clothing itself. To explain a similar trend found in art history to help to understand, the West has focused on what to draw with lines — in that it is an essential element for drawing like a cloth in fashion design — and the East has focused on the line itself and the blank space. Now, in fashion design, it is necessary to pay attention to the direction of designing the material itself and the space that the material can create, rather than staying at the level of what to make with fabric and what form to implement. Through that space, cloth may once again find a way to save humans.
Muyo Park, 朴無要
instagram@parkmuyo
