Behind the Fashion 

In this modern age, commodities and services of all sorts and different brands are emerging and outdated so rapidly that consumers can hardly catch up with the pace and handle it with ease. This is the so called “fashion life”. Yet what is fashion? In order to find out the answer, I look over journals and magazines which inform the latest fashion, cars and jewels in special, in which both the words and pictures deliver an explicit massage to the reader: buy it! When referring to the Internet, clicking the word “fashion” on a website, I found flurries of information on hot issues about beer and skittles, still, intending to lure you into buying something. However, the words concerning fashion itself are seldom mentioned.   

Then it reminds me of a work by an prominent photographer. In the picture, a graceful female model with delicate dressing poses elegantly before quantities of cameras in the background. Yet what impressed the reader is the back of the model, where a line of clothespins in her dressing ducked out for her ladylike figure. The work is named Behind the Fashion.         

What an insight from the artistic angle! The back doesn’t only convey the meaning of truth, but also reveal the causes of fashion. 

Yet surrounded by the consuming-oriented environment in which people are overcrowded, blundering and blindly following trends, how many have noticed what is behind the gorgeous, stylish, elegant or unreasonable fashion trend? How many can they see through the causes of fashion prevailed in different periods? Take the popularity of platform shoes as an example. Apart from some short girls who looked good when wearing platforms, how many tall young ladies’ good appearances were spoiled by wearing the shoes that were not suitable for them at all? The reason why MC HotDog music and Rap are so popular among middle school students may be because they meet the adolescent psychology and their favor for excitement. Yet the lyrics are inundated with pornography and harsh words to the detriment of adolescents’ mental health. Can the illegal pedler take the consequences? Then how about the city man and woman’ vainity propped up by the so called fashion? When women meet each other, what they talk about is “how is it going with your losing weight? ” “what is the popular hair style right now?” “what brands of clothes have you brought recently?”... And when men meet, they talk about “have you change a new car yet?” “have you gain more estate?” “what is the latest type of cellphone you are using?”...         

It is noticeable that as people’s aesthetic standard varies all the time, fashion is inevitably changing. And it has been an indespensable part of modern life. Yet we should be fully aware that in the commodity society the fashionable is not necessarily beautiful, and it might even be a trap. Just as Napoleon said, “fashion leads to many foolish deeds, of which the most serious one is being the slave of it. ”         

Then The Fifth Media, one of the faddish DM advertising magazines nowadays, comes into my mind. It is reasonable to take advantage of advertisements to keep it runing well. However now that it is defined as a sort of media, it should play the role as one of them — in terms of each fashion, to offer readers aboundance of information in greater scope and depth so as to provide consumers with advice and good suggestion; faced with the varied, fast-changing fashion, to look into its essence from the external phenomenon; to dug out its cultural background and origin in order to make a reader clear of what fashion really is when he/she chooses to follow a fashion. Only when the media presents a thorough information on it instead of luring people to spend money, can a fan enjoy fashion in a meaningful and fullfilled way, with what he/she wears and uses perfectly matched with its owner.