Concerning "Political Fashion" in SHOWstudio

Rethink fashion and political.

William Cruz Bermeo*.

Fashion and its connection with politics is a subject that seems to be more interesting for fashion historians and cultural theorist, however is wonderful that can do it for who that make images.

In Western world since the Middle Age fashion and dress had been linked to the social control and support the differences between ones and others, but in those days people no live out fashion and dress like today, since it was given through sumptuary laws that use to say how to dress according to the social status which one belong. On the contrary, today we have the power to do it ignoring any law. Here where we can find the first differential point. On this ground I have to ask myself if in the everyday life we drew on our clothes to make political statements. Some groups in contemporary cities can use their clothes for do it; for instance, hippies in the 60’s, punks in the 70’s. Is accustomed to say these groups were imbued for political beliefs and probably they were. But today we have to recognize that many of this “political fashions” are now just part of an image which no conveys some or nothing from their original beliefs, since it become in “landscape”. The styles that I’m calling are not now “political fashions”, but its wearers can be count like deponents of emergent ideas vs. mainstream politics, and the clothes that use to identify them had lost – for the increasingly use and the way like fashion itself remake it- its original implies. This reminds me Nietzsche and his words about the true in “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense”. There, he let to know us:
True is “A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and; anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions- they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost their embossing and are now considered as metal and no longer as coins.”
However, is not to say that clothes can’t be use, in a particular time, to express or state in relation to political facts, but we have to be cautious about it.

In February of the present year, in Colombia - South America- a country ravages by Farc (namely a terrorist group) thousands of Colombian people marched for the streets against this flagellum. There was an interesting demeanor about clothes for this activity. Mayor’s office urges people to wear white clothes. The picture was great, rivers of people runs on the Colombian streets. But what means white clothes? Usually white is associated with peace, and actually was a march for peace, but the call was for use nothing that could go off course the sense of the march, that is to say no sign on T-shirts, no colors, no graphics, just the silent of the white color. It implied for us rethink about white color and its involves, it’s not only the color of the peace; it was for us the color of the silent. Silent in relation to the atrocity of the war. However, silent for us was not down the head but a way to say No more! And our clothes that day assisted for it.

That’s the reason why I think we have to be cautious of our reading about politics, fashion and clothes. For no fall out into the true that tells Nietzsche. We have to rethink constantly about this, and that’s why this exercise proposed by SHOWstudio is a great contribution to the fashion realm. Since it demonstrates that fashion it’s not only about beautiful images, models and dresses, is too about thoughts and philosophy.

*BA in Fine Arts (Maestro en Artes Plásticas) from Universidad Nacional de Colombia, and Graduate Diploma in Aesthetics (Especialista en Estética) from Universidad Nacional de Colombia
Teacher of History of Fashion at Facultad de Diseño de Vestuario, Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana.