Finding the Right Fit for an Educated Fashion Designer
“I’ve come to realise that the ideas and images you put out into the world have an impact on those who absorb them,” said a fourth-year fashion design student in my class. She was talking to me about her new project. “While I admire creativity, expression and highly emotive work- work that has a negative feeling or a negative mood underpinning it, can only leave others with a negative energy. That’s not what I want to do,” she added. This conversation with her– which actually had been developing in layers over weeks– got me thinking of how multidimensional the nature of fashion design education is.
Fashion Design education is rooted in aesthetics, art and design history, philosophy, sociology, social and civic life, culture, economics. It is now also incorporating new emerging disciplines like digital technology, sustainability and futures studies. A student has to not only absorb these many dimensions of fashion, but also continually make sense of her design intentions vis-à-vis these numerous perspectives. Fashion, in short, blends together art, culture, science, technology, commerce and the creative language of style.
It also primarily draws its knowledge and terminology,–and therefore its bedrock– from the western fashion system. This fashion system while being global, has its power centres– while design is centred and concentrated in western Europe and America, production is distributed in the global south. Fashion design in these centres of fashion has evolved from being the craft of fine tailoring and dressmaking to being an artistic tool that sometimes provokes, sometimes makes a social/ political comment- and almost always dominates the discourse on fashion. The understanding of fashion design in India therefore is largely borrowed, highly influenced by western practices, often peripheral to our social and cultural context and therefore loosely packaged as ‘aspirational’ and ‘luxury’.
The average student entering a fashion design program typically expects her education to be an experience that will encapsulate learning about her area of interest (designing fashionable clothes), fulfil her desire for creative expression and social influence, equip her with the skills she needs to do great work or gain employment, and be an opportunity to learn from the very best of mentors. However, the learning journey proves to be so much more than this. It makes her more acutely aware of the world she inhabits; work is no longer seen as a way of earning a living, but as action aligned to purpose. In all of this she questions what her purpose as a designer is and if that purpose is of any value to society. If yes, what is the nature of that value- is it economic, social, cultural , philosophical or aesthetic? When the answer to this question is philosophical/ aesthetic, she faces a perplexing problem. How does she functionalize her work in an economic system that is structured around creating value (as per demand) and effectively supplying it, either as innovation, sustenance or support? Since money earned becomes an indicator of economic value, she is forced to consider how her aesthetic/ philosophical skills will be monetised. How will they contend with the domineering power of western philosophy, western systems and western practices?
It is in this gap that all sorts of hegemonic ideas of fashion and how its creative power needs to be packaged and presented to the world, fall in. Authentic expression and style, which are so integral to her sense of purpose, become vectors that must now be manipulated. A powerful idea but without the attention-grabbing tropes of creativity– gimmick, deviance, absurdity or purposeless beauty– will regretfully say very little in a space where fashion is increasingly being designed to shock and awe. Purpose, which is of high spiritual origin, in the lower rungs of the market place becomes a strategy/ tactic; it serves as an impressive declaration, an identity, a brand, a differentiator and a competition metric.
Yet, the problem with hegemonic ideas is that they float around alienated from the context of our lived experiences. They are roguish and self-serving. They are also very often the disease that is destroying the system. To adhere to them is to get infected with the same disease. To resist them and walk along your own path requires new knowledge, courage, determination, commitment and resilience. These become the more crucial outcomes of a fashion designer’s education. A young designer must constantly review her intentions and her ideas of success. It’s not easy; partly because of the fact that society in general, perceives fashion as the parade of fancy looks that seem peculiar and self-indulgent…meant for an elite class. Success for them is to have made an entry into that clique. However, for a fashion design student, success is a more complex concept. She has to think like an artist, be creative and rational at the same time, be astute as a business person, be culturally sensitive and yet intuitive enough to anticipate and lead change. She must continually bear in mind that:
1. Success in art is in being able to express the profound wisdom or character of a thing, a person, a circumstance, a moment, an experience, a relationship… with an economy of means.
2. Success in science is to extend the frontiers of our knowledge.
3. Success in trade is generating and acquiring value with an economy of resources.
4. Success in design is to be life-sustaining, life-affirming and to also improve products, systems and processes within an economy of past heritage and contemporary trends.
5. Success in fashion is to cultivate new tastes and preferences and new expressions of identity within an economy of time and desire.
To conclude, the greatest impact of a good fashion design education is that it transforms the fashion designer herself. She no longer fits into her older ideas of her future self. Her ideas about fashion undergo a change. She can now see both- its problems and its possibilities. Her thinking undergoes a change. Her concept of self undergoes a change. Her values undergo a change. She recognises the phenomenal power of fashion and sees herself as an agent of change. She must now look for an area of work that is a suitable fit, or she must shoulder the responsibility to fashion a fit for herself.
