How Religion, Pop Culture, and Media impacts Fashion

How Religion, Pop Culture and Media Impacts Fashion
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How Religion, Pop Culture, and Media Impacts Fashion
Fashion can be anything from how one chooses to dress to how they communicate and generally go about their lives. Fashion embraces hairstyles, beauty, accessories, body art and clothing. It can be described as a form of speech since what people wear and when and how they wear it gives other people a chance to know their social situation or preference at that particular moment. For many years, societies and individuals alike have used clothe and other body accessories and art to communicate, albeit non-verbally, about their gender, social status, role set, occupation, wealth, culture, sexual availability, locality and their ranks. Fashion is therefore used as a language to express the identity of an individual and the society at large. Fashion can be used to pass a message about an individual in a rapid manner to an observer. Accordingly, the paper will discuss how fashion has an impact on pop culture, the media and religion as well how the media, religion and pop culture impacts fashion.
The impact of religion on fashion and vice versa
Religion can be loosely defined as the set of beliefs shared by a group of people that primarily concerns the nature and purpose of the universe which usually contains a code of morality that governs how that group of people conduct themselves. Religion can be used to influence fashion as illustrated through body art such as cross tattoos that were popular a few years back. Fashion designers also use religion as a source of inspiration as seen on the runway designs of Dolce and Gabbana for Fall 2013 ready to wear collection (Hume, 2013). Religion also determines what people wear such as the habits of nuns and the abayas and kaftans for Muslim women.
Religious groups and organizations use dressing as a form of identifying themselves. Dressing, in this perspective, is used to address how the followers of these religions groom themselves, their body adornments and the clothes they wear dressing among religious organizations can serve as a means of non-verbal communication for attributes such as gender and the position a person holds in that particular religion. (Hume, 2013).
Clothing in religion can either be classified as sacred or secular. In most situations, sacred clothing is usually the clothes that have meaningful value to their beliefs and customs and relate to power and gender. A good example is the dressing of the Catholic priests, bishops, and the nuns. The difference in their modes of dressing helps one to identify them by their gender and the religious position they hold. Some religions also have regulations about the way they wear their hair as it is regarded as a sexual symbol. This is the reason why some monks, nuns, and priests may cut their hair as a sign that they are giving up worldly pleasures (Barker, 2001).
Sacred dressings such as beards, hats, aprons, bonnets and head coverings for the Amish and the Mennonites and the burqa and hijabs for Muslim women are usually used to easily identify and distinguish these groups from other groups around them. Other religions may have undergarments that they consider sacred and ar...