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Relay Column: "Myself-This Mysterious Existence" – Looking at the Indications of Kiyokazu Washida's Fashion Theory (Yuka Yamauchi)
PROFILE
Yuka Yamauchi
After graduating from the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Queensland, she is currently enrolled in the Master's program at Osaka University's Graduate School of Humanities. Her specialties are feminist philosophy and fashion studies. By using women with ideal appearances as a clue, she analyzes the suffering of living as a norm and explore ways to escape from it through clothing.
1. Encounter
When did I start to enjoy wearing clothes? I've loved looking at clothes since I was a child. How many times have I been captivated by beautifully coordinated colors or a jet-black scarf fluttering in the wind? Yet, I've often hesitated to wear clothes, putting them back on the shelf because I felt I couldn't wear them well.─
It was one day when I went to a bookstore, bought the book "ひとはなぜ服を着るのか" on a whim, and skimmed through its pages.
There's an inexplicable unseriousness, a carefreeness about fashion. It seems to scoff at being overly serious. There's a deep distrust of seriousness. Somehow, this rebellious nature is intriguingly tied to a sense of beauty and morality. The feeling of being "dorky," the rigidity of a collaboratively fabricated order—fashion detests it the most.
Whether similarly or conversely, fashion as a phenomenon is something that authorities, institutions, and power structures (especially the state and schools) detest the most. The real reason might be that fashion's unseriousness, or the fact it has no concrete foundation, is actually what lies at the core of these structures.
In a society that praises seriousness, it exposes that it inherently possesses the most unserious structure. And there's a kind of unseriousness that won't even dedicate itself wholly to being unserious. (Washida 2012: 241-2)
Ah, so fashion is unserious. Perhaps there truly is no reason for the structures and order we follow. Fashion, with its intrinsic frivolity, highlights the absence of foundation in order, and this revelation was a shock to me. I have always been interested in feminism, exploring means to survive by escaping from the order that shapes our gestures, actions, and what we wear, and it seemed like I had found a clue. With this clue, I've been researching and practicing what wearing clothes means, albeit tentatively.
In practice, I've notably changed the clothes I choose to wear. I started wearing the clothes by Comme des garçons, which once intimidated me. This is because, in the discussion about Comme des garçons in "ひとはなぜ服を着るのか," I found opportunities for escape and resistance from order.
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