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In creating new garments, designers balance their designer creativity – personal design styles, brand identity and ideologies, utility value, originality and practicality – for the consumer (Au et al., 2001). The analysis of a graphic t-shirt of struggle icon Steve Biko revealed that the discourse of the graphics has the potential to convey multiple meanings, as the struggle hero’s ideology and popular use in fashion gave rise to multiple meaning (Vincent, 2007).
The discourse of the aesthetics, as they appear in reality, together with knowledge of the designer’s design style, and target consumer, narrows the reading of the graphics of a t-shirt, while if the aesthetics were read in isolation, they would give rise to multiple meanings (Vincent, 2007). Designers and clothing retailers are aware that their brand identity needs to resonate with their consumer, therefore their product offering articulates fragments of their corporate identity that their intended consumer recognises (Hines et al., 2007). The identity of a fashion brand therefore forms part of the message communicated from the designer to their intended consumer (Gick and Gick, 2007; Bugg, 2009).
Understanding both the brand identity and the collective identity for which the designer creates garments, serves to contextualise the message (Au et al., 2001; Gick and Gick, 2007; Bugg, 2009; Ruppert-Stroescu and Hawley, 2014). The analysis of a brand’s ideology and product offering is also characteristic of a Circuit of Culture analysis which assumes that a company’s culture and ideology is communicated through their product offering (du Gay et al., 1997) which facilitates the understanding of a designers’ intended meaning and how their clothes can be used to shape culture and lived reality.
The cases discussed in this section, and the previous section Fashion as a Reflection of a Collective Identity, reveal that the study of fashion as a socio-cultural communication involves an analysis of the design process in its entirety. Analysing clothing in conjunction with the design process, informs this research’s understanding of fashion as a communication process from designer to consumer. To further contextualise this understanding, the subsequent section discusses the design process as a form of communication.
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consumption fails to reveal the purpose of fashion design. The classification of fashion as a function of trend consumption has contributed to the study of clothing being typecast as a study of frivolity (Barnard, 1996). It is this stereotype about fashion design that this research aims to challenge through an exploration of how the creative endeavours of fashion designers inform knowledge about a specific cultural identity.
Designers use garments as a form of communication, with their aim being the purchase and adoption of their clothing (see Hines and Bruce, 2007; Jackson, 2007; Le Pechoux et al., 2007).
The consumers’ decisions to adopt a trend occurs within the parameters of the styles made available to them by designers, fashion media, retail buyers and retail forecasters (Blumer, 1969). Media often play a role in determining new styles, as they are a source for consumers about information regarding their lifestyle and zeitgeist (Gick and Gick, 2007; Bugg, 2009). As part of the communication dynamic, through the act of consumption, the consumers create a symbolic meaning for the fashionable goods (Crane and Bovone, 2006).
Fashion serves as a “commodity code”, that forms part of the “social codes” of a culture (Chandler, 2007: 149). As a commodity, it speaks of differentiation through adoption of what is new (Chandler, 2007). The value of the garment as a commodity refers not only to its monetary value, but rather to a material good consumed for its ability to convey symbolic value (Crane and Bovone, 2006). Fashion thus serves as a cultural form used to construct and communicate the lived reality of society at any given moment (Crane and Bovone, 2006). This illustrates fashion as a communication process, a Circuit of Culture, between designers and their consumer, the study of which reflects the how meaning is encoded to facilitate the use of clothing to construct and convey identity and collective belonging (Du Gay et al, 1997).
Whether or not consumers are aware of the meaning of their clothing styles, the choice to wear particular garments reflects fragments of their personality (Gick and Gick, 2007). The meaning of a garment therefore changes from designer to media and media to consumer. These meanings however, are rarely analysed within the study of fashion. Fashion is also a social code that reflects the negotiations of belonging and differentiation within a culture (Chandler, 2007).
Fashion is thus more than a commodity, but a cultural artefact. Understanding the manner in which designers use fashion as a communication tool requires the contextualisation of the design process as a communication process.
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Graphic t-shirts have the potential of communicating shared culture, evident in the analysis of South African fashion brand Ama-Kip Kip and Stoned Cherrie (Vincent, 2007; Musangi, 2009).
The analysis of the symbolic meaning designers embed in clothing reveals that clothes serve as a visual narrative of their intended consumer (Bogatsu, 2002; de Greef, 2009). In understanding that design is a form of intended, constructed and reconstructed communication (Kazmierczak, 2013), this research argues that the design process is a meaning-centred communication process; this process differs from the transmission model of communication model conceptualised by Claude Edward Shannon and Weaver (1949). The linear transmission model conceptualises the manner in which information originates from an information source, is converted into a signal and relayed to the information sources’ intendent destination (Shannon and Weaver, 1949). The meaning-centred view of communication underpins the discussion of fashion as a dynamic form of communication.
The meanings-centred approach to the study of communication analyses the process of the construction and conveying meaning (Fiske, 1990; Steinberg, 2007). This view recognises the encoding/decoding model of communication proposed by Stuart Hall (2006 [1980]), discussed further in Chapter 3. Designers create clothing not only with the purpose of creating trends but with the purpose of communicating their thought, beliefs and desires about society to their target market (Barnard, 1996). It is the latter communicative message that this research seeks to identify. Designers present their ideas in the form of clothes, using design aesthetics to convey messages through the medium of clothing to their intended consumer (Au et al., 2001).
Understanding this message is based on the assumption that the design process is a form of encoding that utilises aesthetics as a form a code, if encoding is defined a systematic process of the formulation of a message using various codes in order to convey meaning (Hall, 2006 [1980]).
Understanding the design process as a form of encoding rationalises the use of the Encoding/Decoding model as a theoretical construct that assists the discussion of the production node of the Circuit of Culture model (du Gay et al., 1997; Hall, 2006 [1980]).
Describing the design process provides the textual knowledge for the encoding of a garment – this is elaborated in Chapter 3. The social knowledge required to encode clothing is revealed through the perspective that fashion is both a commodity and a cultural artefact.
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