Relay Column: The Meaning of Dressing Up - The Magic of Fashion (Megumi Ueda)

I'm an artist who creates works using costumes. Costumes refer to the clothing specific to an ethnicity, class, era, and region, including hairstyles and adornments. Particularly, I'm intrigued by adornment and the act of humans decorating themselves, which I call "the act of adornment."

The motivation for adornment can be traced back to species preservation. Many creatures, besides humans, embellish themselves. For instance, male peacocks exhibit sex appeal to females with their flamboyant spread of feathers. Spider decorator crabs use seaweed and other nearby objects to disguise themselves, protecting their bodies from enemies. Each instance displays wisdom in surviving the struggle for existence. On the other hand, human adornment has its unique development. People groom their nails and hair, create ideal bodies through dieting and training, and even change their body shapes by cosmetic surgery or body modification. Moreover, they enjoy fashion for their own pleasure.

Sociologist Georg Simmel analyzed fashion as a perpetual tension between the desire for differentiation from others and the contradictory wish for conformity, the bonding with others. Meaning, we probably perceive fashion as a tool for communication, considering both ourselves and others. Fashion serves as a symbol that manifests the wearer's mentality, moral concepts, and thoughts. As it exists as a visual language, its meaning is multi-faceted, not indicating a fixed concept but fluctuating over time.

I believe that fashion has the magical ability to transform a dull body into a whole different persona. Bernard Rudofsky, in his work "The Unfashionable Human Body," speaks to this using the story of Cinderella. He says, "Children have this story of Cinderella whispered into their ears before they sleep, and it leaves a deep impression in their minds. From an early age, when they can hardly tell right from wrong, they learn from this story about the magical power of clothing. Also, they learn that a woman who can cater to a man's taste can thereby win affection and assurance."

The Cinderella story, in many of its forms, is abundant in our society. I would like to highlight two designers in this respect. The first, Coco Chanel, the founder of Chanel, brought the techniques of men's fashion to women's clothes, leading women from the anxious silhouette constricted by corsets to a relaxed, new silhouette. "Chanel never favored a look that commanded attention or was peculiar or strange. She believed that bold colors, design, and lavish decoration unnecessarily caught people's attention, preventing the wearer from being relaxed. Above all, Chanel favored outfits where women, relieved from corsets, could genuinely be themselves––not judged through the eyes of men." (Ishii, 1994, p172) The innovative aspect of Chanel wasn't that she forced women to wear men's clothes, but rather that she attempted to liberate the true selves of women within the realm of women's fashion.