Fashion Culture About Prescriptive Dress
Dressing is considered as one of the major symbols or indicators of an individual’s culture, socio-economic status, moral standards, and social power. Throughout the history of mankind, particularly in the 21st Century, dressing has been utilized as a symbol of enforcing class differences in terms of socio-economic status. In some cases, dressing or dress code is utilized as a powerful tool to negotiate and organize social relations. Dressing acts as a powerful social tool since clothing is a cultural process that materializes social value. Through this process, clothing is the culmination of a procedure that merges the production of fashion and culture. Clothing is not only considered as a second skin, but a tool that alters the body and gives people social value.
One of the forms of dressing that has dominated fashion in today’s society is prescriptive dress, which is also known as prescription clothing. While prescriptive dress has existed for a long period of time, it became prominent from the 1960s when the fashion industry started to create and distribute more than adequate fashion items for everyone to be fashionable.[footnoteRef:1] The proliferation of numerous fashion items implied that by the 21st Century, everyone across the globe could imitate new styles immediately. The imitation of fashion products in turn provided the premise for prescription clothing to help guide people on what to wear and what not to depending on the environment or...
[1: Katalin Medvedev, “Social Class and Clothing,” Fashion History, accessed October 26, 2017, http://fashion-history.lovetoknow.com/fashion-history-eras/social-class-clothing]
Prescriptive clothing has become a controversial issue that has attracted arguments and counterarguments to an extent that it’s been the topic of numerous research and surveys in the fashion industry. The controversy surrounding this issue is attributable to the fact that through prescriptive clothing, people wear what they are told to wear rather than simply choosing to wear what they want to. Prescriptive dressing has permeated today’s society and culture as people seek to fashionable. The significance of prescriptive dress in today’s society is attributable to the fact that people have become more impressionable and want to fit in. In light of this Emily Gould and Rumaan Alam recently published an article on prescriptive dress given the proliferation of lifestyle-touting subscription clothing services.[footnoteRef:2] Subscription clothing services and other clothing delivery services have become tools for enforcing a form of totalitarian conformity. Even though these clothing services were designed to help people feel great, they have become avenues for prescription clothing through enforcing some form of conformity in how people dress. The article seemingly suggests that clothing delivery services only provide people with convenience at the expense of self-expression because of their focus…
