The role of fashion design
I believe that it is desirable for the fashion design to include a process in which designers directly participate in production. In other words, a direction that includes handicraft elements. Otherwise, driven by the advancement of technology, the design process will be carried out in virtual reality to the final stage. Even on a virtual stage through the screen, you can already see the consequence with too much clarity and completeness.
The problem is, it stops at that stage.
The era in which you can see the entire clothes through the screen is no different from the era in which you can understand your design process using only language. In fact, fake thesis created by programs passed, and novels written by artificial intelligence passed the national literary contest in Japan are already a thing of the past. Furthermore, we are living in an era where paintings drawn by artificial intelligence are purchased at auction. With this flow, the current level of fashion design that can be replaced by language will soon descend from the status of a unique human domain.
Being substitutable by language means being dependent on language.
As soon as it becomes subordinated, fashion design will become an area where communication is possible not only in natural language but also in artificial-computer language. Nonetheless, the good news is that, whether it is programming or human conversation, clothes are not the subject of chatter.(At least, it remains a form of belief for not a few people.) The belief that it will be able to fulfill another role without stopping at the level of a conversation comes from the following characteristics of clothes. Clothes are only able to confirmed the existence of themselves by people.
Clothes cannot be independent of the body, at least not yet. When clothes leave a human’s body and exist alone, from that moment, clothes lose their role. Furthermore, although the design of clothes starts with the designer, unless designers make and wear clothes for themselves, clothes have the characteristic of being settled by someone other(mostly consumers) than designers themselves. Therefore, it can be seen that clothes have an alien personality that is different from the one who made the clothes. Clothing designed by a designer is inevitably the wearer’s, not the designer’s.
Clothes eventually connect the two objects, the designer and the wearer.
At the same time, the clothes themselves cover themselves and form an entangled relationship with the body they surrounded, and they can also perform the function of a medium that draws responses between different objects and forms new relationships. In order for clothes to be able to take on new roles in the future without being swayed by language, it is necessary to discuss the relationship with clothes.(especially based on the characteristics of clothes, which discussed above.)
To that end, we do not define a person’s first impression as clothes, and clothes themselves should not be limited to a means of expression.(The most powerful driving force of the contemporary fashion industry.) In other words, beyond how to cover the body, which means technique, and express what is expressed with clothes, which means fashion design.
We have to move on to the next issue; Can clothes become objects of meeting rather than wearing objects?
To throw one vaguely on one thing, the discussion of how to bring the body that is not covered by the clothes on the wearer’s body into clothes may be one approach to the problem presented above. Personally, I see the aforementioned problem as a problem of the degree of correspondence with blank space in painting or installation space in sculpture. In order to introduce the problem of correspondence in clothes, the clothes must be clothes that do not stand out on their own, and that the wearer can liven up with the clothes. In conclusion, clothes should be able to interact with the wearer enough to elicit human actions and gestures corresponding to the body, not just a confined means and function.
Muyo Park, 朴無要
instagram@parkmuyo
