Designing in the Context of Fashion – Designing the Fashion Context

Fashion is a collective cultural phenomenon generated by the individual but linked to actions of a very large number of garment designers aiming to create distinctive but similar clothes. This paper outlines the mental processes, behavioural strategies and working patterns through which fashion and knitwear designers actively construct the contexts – their visual environments as well as memories of individual garments and mental representations of the spaces of acceptable garments – in which they design. Designers form each other’s contexts through the garments they create, which are seen at shows, in magazines, in shops, and on the streets – communicating through impersonal cultural channels. The consumers play a relatively minor role in selecting from a very restricted choice. As they share a vocabulary of design elements, garment designs are, to varying degrees, collective and cultural as well as individual. We argue that creativity in garment design resides in finding innovative understandings of the spaces of acceptable garments and perceptual evaluations of acceptability as much as in idea generation.