“The sociological understanding of fashion involves an analysis of consumers who adopt fashion and their consumption behavior because the consumers participate indirectly in the production of fashion. When fashion reaches the stages of adoption and consumption, it is converted into something more concrete and visible, that is clothing-fashion. Once fashion is produced , it has also to be consumed in order for the belief to continue and peretuate. Without the act of reception and consumption, the cultural product of fashion is not complete.
Production influences cosumption, and consumption influences production. Therefore, they can be treated simultaneously in the anlysis of fashion. Similarly, the consumption aspect of cultural products must be taken into consideration, and we need to question how the consumers of fashion integrate with the producers of fashion.
Consumption cannot be considered in isolation. Fashion-ology consistes of a sociology of fashion production as well as a sociology of fashion consumption because consumption and production are complementary,especially in todays diverse and complex fashion systems which includes fashions emerging from youth culture.
Holbrook and Dixon (1987:110) defines fashion as public consumption through which people communicate to others as the image they wish to project. This defination contains three primarily descriptive components:1) public consumption, 2)communication to others, and 3)image.
In mordern and postmordern societies, consumption and production are complementary and therefore, production does not take place within a completely seperate sphere in relation to the broader social context of consumption. The relationship between production and consumption in particular culture industry called fashion have been explored. Both empirical research and theoretical understanding are equally important and related through the ways in which the products are circulated and given paritcular meanings through the range of production-consumption relationships. The meaning-making processes and pratices do not simply arise out of one automomous sphere of production but also out of consumption. Distinctions and differences between fashion and anti-fashion, high fashion and mass fashion, men and women, and rich and poor, among many other social categories, are breaking down.” (Fashion-ology by Yuniya Kawamura)