Sophie Robertson. BA (Hons) Fashion Photography
The concept of the fashion body provokes in me a number of ideas and thoughts. For example, the role I play in an industry which is dedicated to style, personal identity or the ways we use clothes and adornment to express our bodies. How I like to try and fashion my body through running and yoga; but ultimately for me its the way that fashion is centred on our bodies. I am fascinated by fashion’s day-to-day integration into our lives – from the act of dressing to undressing, to how certain clothes help in the rituals that bind communities and society together. Whether its the clothes we wear to an interview or the sports uniform that make us either a player or supporter, clothes are central to our existence.
I am interested in how over time we learn how to formulate our own personal ideas about adornment, clothing and identity. As our understanding of how we can transform ourselves through our clothes, so we interact with the wider group that is the broader fashion body or society. As individuals we might at one and the same time stand for both being fashionably forward thinking – able to develop a style that others want to copy, but on the other hand be part of a fashionable body of people, a collective that has its own fashionable parameters which may or may not fit directly with our own.
I like to watch how at some mysterious point, clothing becomes fashion and visa versa and how an individual’s approach transfers to the fashionable collective. I am inspired by how the wider fashion body encompasses so many different fashion aspects – from the design, production and manufacture of clothes; through the complex global retail industry; to the fashion media that includes a plethora of blogs, tweets, shows and magazines.
It is this complex inter-related fashion body that captures and allows us all to express our thoughts about fashion. For me, this should be a fashion that is not fast, that is not dependent on celebrity endorsement or a stylist’s perspective. I am interested in being part of a fashion body that may be able to decipher all these references but at its heart, understands that fashion has an influence that touches the economic, social, cultural and creative. This is what makes the concept of the fashion body dynamic, stimulating and inherently aspirational, for it recognises that the fashion body on some level touches everything that we do both as individuals and as a society.
