by wiggly--woo » Sat Oct 25, 2014 7:41 pm
In an attempt to do uni work and care-tagging simultaneously I think I accidently stumbled upon an idea I quite like. Bear with me, but in The Image of the City, Kevin Lynch talks about the idea of "legible" cities or, in other words, cities that organise their parts into coherent patterns that can be easily read by the city's people.
I only mention this because I think the idea of “legibility” can be applied to fashion/clothing and particularly to an individual outfit. It doesn’t really matter if you’re looking at a person’s outfit in real-life 3d or whether you’re looking at a 2d representation of an outfit (such as in a fit pic), the idea is the same - good outfits are often legible, easily read, easily understood, coherent. Every outfit includes, to some extent or another, things like colours, textures, fabrics, cuts, brands, gendered-ness, seasonality, and references to sub-culture and geography. A legible outfit, therefore, uses these factors (and others?) to create a “coherent pattern” of sorts.
I’m not really sure where juxtaposition fits into this – think traditionally masculine and aggressive garments but with feminine touches, for instance – but I guess juxtaposition perhaps can create a legible coherence of sorts – e.g. a challenge against the rigidity/binary of gender – even if it does simultaneously go against the idea of coherence and legibility somewhat. The point I’m trying to make, or at least the point I think I’m trying to make, is that the idea of legibility creates a framework of sorts where something like brand synergy is seen not as an end in and of itself, but as a means to an end, or one of many possible means to an end, with that end being a legible outfit, an outfit that is easily read. It should also be said that I don't for one minute think a good outfit requires strong legibility (i'm not milspastic), I just think that a lot of good outfits are legible.
But now i'm wondering if legibility is simply the counterpart to innovation and creativity? Or maybe, legibility and outfits mutually constitute eachother in some way. I dunno. In retrospect, I’m not sure how much of the above is understandable. In fact, I’ve essentially taken the things that everybody already knows and put it in unnecessarily complicated language and then laboured my point over far too many words. But I’ve had a lot of coffee today and these things happen.