By: Boma Benjy Iwuoha
I recently came across a blog by a fashion student Bianca Luini titled WHERE I SEE FASHION; in her blog, she matches fashion images with photography and art that share like shapes, concepts, and colours. Her quote says “Fashion is Everywhere and Everything is in Fashion” and she has set about proving that statement right with the pictures.
While she is doing her thing, I took a closer look at the quote, “Fashion is Everywhere and Everything is in Fashion”, such a strange quote; How could she say Fashion is Everywhere; Isn’t it funny how the people in the arts always want to relate everything they do to all aspects of life? I thought so, especially coming from a science background myself. That was until I attended an office training last weekend and found a way to relate that statement to our daily lives and paint a broader picture.
The training had nothing to do with fashion, in case you’re wondering, it was all about business, deliberate practice, top performance and all those exercises that try to help you figure out reasons why you are not performing at your peak, so it supposedly had nothing to do with fashion; Or so I thought until we veered into the discussion about a colleague who seemed to be losing a good business deal and everyone was asked to analyze the situation and come up with possible reasons why he is at the point of losing the business deal.
That’s when it struck me, that fashion is indeed everywhere, even in business. You wouldn’t believe one of the strong reasons given was that he probably wore the wrong shoes, or dressed in a way that did not complement the proposal he presented or the company he represents thereby creating doubts in the minds of the potential clients. While some people may argue that how does your sense of fashion affect the contents of your brain, I assure you it does and by the end of that meeting, though it was a business training, everyone understood why they had to look the part they played every time.
Why did I have to take this angle today? This is, after all, a fashion article, right? I will answer that question by asking one of mine, why do we dress up every day? We could go out in our comfortable bathroom slippers, right? And here are some possible answers I came up with:
- We want to present an image
- Make an impression
- Tell a story about who we are – Identity
- You never know who you will meet in the course of the day
- You want to influence decisions
- It makes you more confident
- Self-expression
You can add yours to the list, but every single reason out there basically takes us to a simple fact, we all want to make an impression, in our different walks of life. Some people say they prefer to remain in the background and go unnoticed, but even that is an identity; when you choose colors that allow you to blend into the background and become a wallflower, people may not call you out because they recognize that you want to go unnoticed. You have succeeded in creating an Identity. So yes, fashion is everywhere.
When you work as an auto mechanic, you want to own some coveralls and you will most likely own several pairs of jeans; you may not have started off as a jeans person in high school, you probably were a prom girl, but fashion is in everything we do. If the auto mechanic were to schedule a meeting with a top CEO for billion dollar contract, chances are she would try to put a clean white shirt over a neat pair of jeans; passing a message, “I’m a mechanic and a chic one, I can handle a billion dollars”
One way or the other, we find a way to involve fashion in every decision we take because it is the number one form of self-expression. So I completely agree with Bianca Luini’s Quote “Fashion is Everywhere and Everything is in Fashion”, what do you think?
Next up, we will be looking at some interesting ways fashion affects our everyday lives, see you then.
