You are What You Wear

 

We all know that your style, the clothes you choose reflect and affect your mood, heath and overall confidence. Putting a piece of clothing make you adopt some of the characteristics associated with it, for instance casual clothes make you feel relaxed and tomboyish, while dressing up for a special occasion or a meeting boosts your confidence and makes you look more professional, and can affect your success, as clothing significantly influences how others perceive you and how they respond to you. That’s the power of dressing up, a power that can be increased exponentially based on the type of fashion you choose to identify to.

1216079.jpg

High end fashion

More eloquently known as Haute Couture is the creation of exclusive and unique clothing made from high quality fabric, limited in quantity and extremely expensive to purchase.

Image Source: Christian Dior

Clothing-Poverty-by-Andrew-Brooks.jpg

Fast Fashion

Based on a model of mass produced, “of the moment” items that are sold at a lower price. They are also deliberately made to have a short life span (breaking down or shrinking in the wash) and therefore replaced very quickly with newer and trendier items.

Image Source: Times Higher Education

Fast fashion industry is conceived for people who heavily splurge on multitudes of clothing, thinking that being fashionable and stylish is about owning more apparel, accessories, handbags, shoes and so on. They forget one point, that fashion is more than that. If you look on a deeper level, you will understand that Fashion is a lifestyle, a conduit to confidence, it has the ability to empower and transform you.

Haute Couture work upon that, believing firmly that clothing has the power to influence a person’s confidence, thus making the individual a stronger individual. So, they work through trial and error to develop exclusive pieces of clothing that will make you feel unique.

Image Source: Emporio Armani

Image Source: Emporio Armani

Fashion is inherently individual, and akin to personal style. The truth is, following trends (and indeed, ‘fast fashion’) is more likely to have a detrimental impact on confidence if the particular trend isn’t suitable for a person’s body shape or natural interest or style.

Adopting a style in clothing that mimics a trend but not the individual can lead to an erosion of the individual’s sense of self-belief and understanding of who they are themselves. It no longer becomes an expression of personality but rather, a reflection of ‘expectation’. So fast fashion contributes to eradicate personal preferences, style and uniqueness, while high end fashion boosts our self-esteem.

 
Dapper Contributor