CRS 231-Fashion: Art or Usability?

Many people have always seen high fashion as more of an art form then actual clothing that is wearable. When looking at the designer’s collections from New York, Paris, and Milan, we see clothing that one couldn’t imagine wearing on an everyday basis. For example, how many people are we going to see wearing a transparent dress on the street? My guess is not very many at all. However, when comparing the fashion weeks in these three cities, Milan takes the credit for designing clothing not to be worn, but more to be recognized as art. Although the clothing we saw at New York fashion week may not all be extremely wearable, it certainly possess more usability for the fashion conscious person.
When I think of art, I think of beautiful and complex paintings, structures, or drawings that are meant to be admired by the human eye. Milan fashion week was remarkably similar to how one would feel when stepping into an art museum. In the beginning of the Milan fashion week video on Style.com, Tim Blanks comments that this kind of fashion fell “somewhere between technology and transparency.” The clothing that we saw in Milan was nothing less than complex and I felt it had much more emotion and meaning behind it than the fashion we witnessed in New York and Paris. I believe that it is important for apparel to provoke a certain feeling from the viewer or wearer, giving the clothing a “soul,” as if it were an entity that was live in its own form. Many of the pieces we saw in Milan were airy and soft but, to counter act that, the shoes were undeniably geometric and structured. I thought that we really got to see the amount of craft a designer has in the outcome of the shoes they created. One “fashionista” on the Style.com video stated that buyers and designers are really questioning, “How high can you go? (regarding the heels)” and much like art, the sky’s the limit.
Milan really stood apart from New York and Paris simply because the designers really captured the essence of what true high fashion is about, art. New York, especially, displayed amazing clothing that people here in American might connect with more because it is more wearable and possesses usability. For example, Vera Wang and Calvin Klein both created a line that many women can look at and say “I could see myself wearing that.” I personally enjoyed watching and analyzing Milan fashion week the most due to the fact that it really pushed the envelope, was extremely edgy, but was still ground down here on earth at the same time.