As complex multi-aspect phenomena, fashion and lifestyle have long been the objects of study within the most diverse sciences about humanity and culture: history and theory of culture, sociology, psychology, economic science, aesthetics, semiotics, etc.
Many people are used to the fact that the word “fashion” is associated with clothing. However, this is not the case. Fashion is a lifestyle. It declares itself in a healthy lifestyle, sports, music, books, dancing, clothing, and a positive attitude. And it is manifested in all industries, from vehicle manufacturing to printing, from construction to theater and so on. After all, a person strives to keep up with the times and develop. Therefore, for a person, there is no limit to perfection.
Fashion acts as the external arrangement of the internal content of public life, expressing mass preferences of a given society at a given time. Functions of fashion include its ability to design, predict, distribute, and implement certain values and patterns of behavior, as well as to shape individual tastes and guide them. Fashion complements the traditional forms of culture through their modern interpretation and creates a new environment for humans on this basis. Thus, fashion acts as one of the socialization tools.
Today’s fashion tends to converge and blur national styles based on popular culture and universal style. This is its “cosmopolitan” function. We can also talk about its economic function associated with dynamism: thanks to fashion, things go out of style before getting physically worn, and this provides the production sector with demand for new things, constantly clearing the market for sales.
Fashion is focused on today’s world, but tradition is an important source of fashionable innovations. Other sources are artistic creation, scientific discoveries, technical inventions, the development of new materials, and so on.
Research on fashion should not be limited to its reduction only to an aesthetic phenomenon, which leads to the loss of many features of its nature and functioning.
