What do Good Design and Fashion mean to you?

There's been an argument about Apple is giving design a bad name that discusses how Apple, which is the leader of innovative products today has started to neglect few of its very important principles in designing a good product, that they are moving towards visual simplicity and elegance at the expense of learnability, usability and productivity. It is a fun and good article to read. Nonetheless, I think more about the design of the clothes more than the phones or the iPads, because the same principle could actually be applied on the clothes that you and I buy nowadays.

Source: Taken from www.fastcodesign.com

It's all about glamour in fashion industry, that we can't deny the fact that we love fashion because it makes us feel good, pretty, confident and classy. However, without us knowing the reality behind it, the fashion industry is slowing destroying our basic needs of wearing a piece of chic and fashionable design-- at least, for most of us, because we ain't all having a Victoria's Secret angel's hourglass and tall body. We often get clothes that just don't really fit us, the sleeves might be too short, the pants might not fit our butts, the mid-length skirts might become calf-length skirts for us, and what's worse? Some of us just got discriminated from the fast fashion retailers that we can't find anything to fit.

Some examples of the problems we face when we shop for clothes.

The unfortunate part is that we don't blame the industry, we don't blame the designers, we blame ourselves, for not being so skinny and tall, we blame our parents for not giving us the perfect DNA we need-- just as the author said in the article, we blame ourselves when we can't see the tiny text on an iPhone, albeit we know that it is actually just a norm among us that the font is indeed too small for many of us. Ditto for fashion industry, the idea that 'we are just not good enough' just got deeply entrenched in us.

Without Apple intentionally reinforcing the old idea that a designer's only job is to make things look beautiful, I always feel so bad to see that fashion industry is the only industry that doesn't inforce it before, it has always been living this way, it has never moved on. It's always a designer's first priority to make the collection looks beautiful, but they often do it at the expense of allowing each of his/her customers to feel pretty, confident and chic, instead, we let the industry tells us what our values are-- through their shows, their advertisements, their designs.

What can make this issue more ironic is when we see people lining up in front of H&M stores for its debuts of Balmaination collection to get a piece (or pieces) of... H&M. People want to get this collection because it's designed by high fashion designer Olivier Rousteing from Balmain, it's like a bargain! But we got slapped right in our faces that we are not skinny enough to wear designer clothes, although this is a collection sold in H&M-- a clothing retailer that sells clothes to mass market, where most of us don't have the kind of 'high fashion' bodies. Many have claimed that the size for the Balmaination collection has got so small that we're advised to get at least one size bigger. You might say 'oh well, it's pretty normal for H&M to follow Balmain's sizing scales since they're designer clothes'. While that might sound make sense, why designer clothes' sizes have to be so small?

Of course their designs are beautiful, this is a fact.

Of course I know they are fashion retailers that follow standard sizes, not made-to-measure tailored clothings.

But why we discriminate people who don't have standard sizes, while we know that there're a lot of people who don't have?

It's not that you're not good enough, you're just being discriminated, unknowingly.

Perhaps, they don't want people who don't have standard sizes to ruin their designs... haha what an irony. This makes me wonder what exactly is a good piece of design, but I'm certain that we need more designers who could cater different sizes' needs.

Besides, the fast fashion and the decadence of people in the seemingly 'lavish' lifestyle without really becoming richer also have killed the art of fashion. Not soon later Apple'd be facing the similar problem as fashion industry does, that the consumers will demand more convincing pretty designs at a ridiculous faster pace. This will not be a win-win situation, the company has to spend even more on design and R&D, and you have to dig more and more money out of your pocket. We have seen Raf Simons left Christian Dior because the fast pace in fashion doesn't allow him to have time to think on his collections anymore. We rarely use a phone until it dies, many people have so many clothes left unworn in their wardrobes, we don't really see a piece of design being worn too many times because it is deemed 'out of season'... These are just a few cases where we take things for granted. We just do not appreciate good designs anymore. Then why we love fashion?

Do we really need to let the essence of art and design fade out this way?

What does fashion really mean to us?

If I were a fashion designer, I certainly would not want to see my baby being dumped after she could only greet the washing machine one time.

Just a fairly short post to share my thoughts after reading this good article by Don Norman and Bruce Tognazzini. I just have to stop myself from discussing too much on this issue because you might see a ten thousand words post from me.

You might also be interested in "WHAT'S WRONG WITH MY BODY?" here.

#Fashion