Fashion is something we deal with everyday. Even people who say they don't care what they wear choose clothes every morning that say a lot about them and how they feel that day. Fashion is a language which tells a story about a person who wears it. For centuries individuals or societies have used clothes and other body adornment as a form of nonverbal communication to indicate occupation, rank, gender, sexual availability, locality, class, wealth and group affiliation. Fashion is a form of free speech. It not only embraces clothing, but also accessories, jewellery, hairstyles, beauty and body art. What we wear and how and when we wear it, provides others with a shorthand to subtly read the surface of a social situation. Moreover, the individual uses fashion as a means to identify clearly the many different roles that a person plays in any one day.
Fashion is also one of the most favoured forms of semiotic distinction as fashionable clothes, accessories and body adornment are status symbols that are easy for others to observe at glance.
Nowadays fashion is big business. I hope you will agree that it involves more people than any other business in the world. For everyday, millions of workers design, sew, glue, dye, and transport clothing to stores. Ads on buses, billboards and magazines give us ideas about what to wear, consciously or subconsciously. The mass production of clothing truly developed between the First and Second World Wars. Emancipation of Women and the contribution of all classes of women to the First World War enabled and encouraged women to adopt more practical clothing and to try out new styles in fashion, hair and beauty. During the first 50 years of the twentieth century views of women and their proper roles changed as women gained the right to vote and entered the workforce. Production methods became more streamlined and by the 1950s increasing numbers of women abandoned the little dressmaker and bought from the increasing majority of chain stores.
