Today's coffee talk is on music and how music has affected our fashion and in turn our outlook, cultural and social norms.
Here are some thoughts and rambles of the day:
What we find appropriate to wear and how we define ourselves can stem from our cultural influences such as music and all that goes along with that, such as music videos, MTV, Spotify, ITunes and so forth, and within that how technology has influenced how music's impact has reached us. On the other hand the influences on music and on us come and can come from cultural aspects such as youth sub cultures, therefore inadvertently, we affect the fashion of music, fashion and attitude.
This topic of discussion started from the fact that at Art Breath we have been listening this week to a lot of 90s music, such as Suede, Blur, Pulp and we have also been playing out loud Jamie T and Stormzy. Music that also brings into play politics and our cultural times, then (the 90s) and now. From there started to think about what was in fashion in the 90s and what is in fashion now, and how recently sportswear has been elevated to high fashion when during the Britpop era, it was much more about being grungy-admittedly it coming after the grunge era. The 90s was also rave music and the now famous emoji was a smiley face on a t-shirt.
So fashion, music, culture and politics intertwine. This is almost a given. There are so many duos, collaborations and history between the disciplines, that this really comes at no surprise. Think leather jacket, think rock, think cargo pants, think drum'n'base or maybe All Saints, think punk, think Vivienne Westwood and so on. There are historical steps and points, but also a really organic fusion, as both music and fashion are forms of expression, about projection, communication, identity, political issues and freedom.
For coffee talk we took these fusions to see how that affects or had affected our attitudes, what we like or liked, how we feel or felt, how we think or thought, and what we think is appropriate or not and if that changed which then fed into discussing what people perceive or perceived as norms or not.
What did you wear when you listened to a certain type of music and did that in turn affect how you felt about politics, or about the world? What did you listen to when you decided to wear that piece of clothing? Or what did that fashion item make you want to listen to? And how did this all make you feel? Part of a tribe, a community?
What do you all think?
And if anything, what's playing as you read this?
