~ Some of the new Japanese fashions seemed absurd. They had rips. They focused attention on body parts that the wearer usually ignored. Fashion became a kind of discipline, a transcendental perspective on the body as the wearer observed it responding to the caresses and restraints of the clothing. This was fashion on a sensitivity scale skewed in the direction of increased awareness and subtlety. At the same time it was fun. ~ Leonard Koren22 History of deconstruction in apparel and the implication of ‘wear-and-tear’ : Many historical priors of deconstructed fashion exist, a case in point the costly silks woven with slits and slashes on purpose. Slashing was deemed one of the strangest fashion occurrences of the sixteenth-century German Renaissance and supposedly started in 1477. They were derived from the clothes of the ‘Landsknecht’ - German mercenary soldiers whose battle-scarred attire brought slashing into fashion during the Renaissance. Seized upon by royal circles who quickly adopted this flashy new style, it was aped by courtiers across Europe, becoming another kind of uniform.23
In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the 'degraded’ look in fashion emerged through ragpickers who made their living selling discarded clothing . These people scavenged cloth for recycling, utilising the waste that was created by the frivolity of fashion at its most extreme.24
To adapt an old saying, it was not just what they did, but the way in which they did it that distinguished punk from other subcultural styles.25 I establish connections between the punk movement and wabi-sabi to show that ‘mistakes’ such as:
Rips
Tears
Holes
Loose threads
Unevenness
Raggedness
And other marked departures from conventionality,
were displayed with pride and without regrets. Fashion projects an image, and an image that is created by subcultures is more clear, pronounced and encompasses a whole lifestyle rather than a merely clothes and an outfit.26 It can be argued that the first present-day illustrations of deconstruction in fashion appeared in clothing worn by punks from 1976.
For Dick Hebdige, notable British media theorist and sociologist, the punk’s unique outward appearance created its own definition of an aesthetic taste,27 which was something I had intended to do since the start of this project.
22
Koren, New Fashion Japan, p.1.
Alexander Fury, ‘JOIN THE CLUB’, The Independent, 8 September 2015 in ProQuest <https:// search.proquest.com/docview/1709897453/fulltext/5088EEC1D27D4FF9PQ/1? accountid=28521>[accessed May 17, 2019]. 23
24
Valerie Steele, Japan Fashion Now (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), p. 109
Malcolm Barnard, Approaches to Understanding Visual Culture (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire ; New York: Palgrave, 2001), p.189. 25
Yuniya Kawamura, Fashion-Ology: An Introduction to Fashion Studies, Second edition (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2018) p.108. 26
27
Kawamura, Fashion-Ology: An Introduction to Fashion Studies, p.105.
