From Fashion as Kitsch to Kitsch in Fashion: Redefining Beauty and Taste Today

Abstract

For centuries, fashion has been underestimated in relation to higher cultural forms of art: Fashion was considered too frivolous—too kitschy—for serious study. In the last decades, discourses on art and fashion have increasingly proliferated, and a significant number of fashion designers and brands have created collections, designs, and fashion shows that challenge extant forms of beauty and taste. With a necessary re-evaluation of the concept of kitsch and a brief overview of its essentially pejorative conceptions and aesthetics, this chapter discusses high fashion’s re-appropriation of kitsch and its new sociologic and artistic implications. The study explores how postmodern fashion is adopting kitsch strategies to question conventional ideas about taste, originality, gender, and popular culture, and where the collaboration between artists and individual creators, luxury houses and mass-consumption brands is becoming a distinctive feature. The theoretical ideas are discussed through a selection of cases that are embodying the contradictions, debates, and creative opportunities in fashion nowadays.