Qualms with Fashion as Language #

August 20, 2025
Nowhere in particular

I’ve been interested in the idea of fashion as language for a while now. Of course, this isn’t a new idea by any means, I’d first heard about it through Derek Guy of “Die, Workwear” a few years back. This is a very appealing idea, and explains a lot about modern fashion to me. Something that I’ve found interesting about fashion since around 2020 is that aesthetics seem to have started to play the forefront in the ideas being expressing by people exploring fashion (most prominently online). I first noticed this with aesthetics like “dark academia” and “cottage-core”, where people were dressing to express an affiliation with an idea first and foremost.

In this way, fashion as language makes a lot of sense, right? The people participating in these aesthetics are wearing these clothes and mixing these ideas to express an idea or to affiliate themselves with an idea. The people dressing in dark academia wanted to affiliate themselves with the idea of bookishness, literature, university, and academia (with gothic undertones). The same goes with the languages of “cottagecore” or “normcore” or “zizmorcore” and so on so forth.

Of course, when Derek Guy was speaking of the idea of fashion as a language, he was more specifically referring to fully fleshed out styles. Think of ivy, prep, americana, workwear, and punk, for example. Each of these are styles of which we have a clear image in our head. So, if I am correctly understanding the way that Derek Guy explains these languages, these styles are ideas that we can speak to through the way we dress. In this way, these styles will always look great because they already have a fashion (and cultural) lexicon by which they have been developed!

This is a really great metaphor for fashion, especially for how fashion feels to me in this modern day. We are all tapping into aesthetics, styles, and ideas to some degree when we dress ourselves. It does feel like a language, like we are harkening back to something or some people with every piece of garment we put on. And that’s a lovely idea! I really mean it, this metaphor has truly impacted the way I view outfits and how I dress myself in the morning.

The interesting thing about these languages and with the way I see people dressing, though, is that the interaction with the ideas they represent is purely through fashion. If we take something like punk, it was the music that came first, and then the clothes that came to identify you as part of that tribe. On the other hand, if we look at dark academia, it was the fashion and aesthetic that came before the pursuit of literature and the humanities. This isn’t necessarily true for everybody involved in this aesthetic, but there is a reason we consider some of these styles “aesthetics” and not “subcultures” or “tribes”. In this way, it can occasionally feel like while we may be speaking the language of a style, we are not actually partaking in the culture that style was birthed from. While this distinction does exist between aesthetics and subcultures, it does seem that even when we follow subcultural styles, we are doing it purely aesthetically.

I don’t actually find this point to be a problem, personally, mostly because cultures can change. While suits and ivy might be fundamentally tied up with some set of ideologies (wealth, elite universities, etc.) in America, it doesn’t necessarily mean that same thing in, for instance, Japan, and things that start purely as aesthetics can evolve to become more than that. This sort of arm-wringing about people “posing” as something they aren’t has been around for a very long time, and isn’t really an issue for me.

Recently, I read an article by Charlie Caulfield titled “Ditch the Fashion Guide”, which expressed ideas that I heavily agree with. I strongly recommend you read the article, but the core of it is that we are giving away too much of our thought to manuals for how to dress and that fashion now really feels filled with references to references to references. In this way, I do feel like we are several times divorced from the ground truth of the original fashion ideas that we are expressing.

To explain that further, an example that I have been thinking a lot about is ivy fashion (mostly because I recently finished reading Ametora). Specifically, when I’m going to work, I’m often wearing an oxford collar button down (OCBD) and some form of chinos. One of these past days, I noticed I was selectively wearing clothes from Japan: I was wearing a white OCBD from Kamakura and grey chinos from Uniqlo. Both of these companies have connections to VAN Jacket, the company that brought ivy fashion to Japan. Notably, the man who created Kamakura used to work for VAN jacket, and the father of the man who created Uniqlo sold VAN jacket garments! Kamakura is, thus, heavily influenced by that Japanese take on ivy style, and Uniqlo is to some degree birthed of that world as well.

This is both cool and weird right? I am an American wearing clothes from Japan that were originally made to mimic the styles of American students in ivy league universities in the 1950s and 1960s. Added to that, I’m a second generation Indian immigrant, which further confuses any of the ideas I’m expressing here! Which language am I speaking when I am wearing these clothes? Am I speaking the language of those old American students, or a language of the Japanese who re-created these garments? Or am I speaking a totally new language here? Does my identity change the ideas I’m expressing? If I’m following these ideas of fashion as language, though, how can I be speaking a totally new language if I am wearing these garments that are categorically apart of “ivy” (even if that might mean a lot of different things now)?

I think that is where context comes in. The Japanese that were wearing ivy were referencing American ivy through that “language”, but made it their own to some degree. Now, I’m wearing ivy and referencing both Japan and America through the “language” that I’m speaking. But isn’t that inherently referential? I’m not adding in any new ideas by wearing these garments external to myself the person wearing them. This idea of fashion as language has to be referential because you are speaking a language that has already been developed. Don’t get me wrong, this is still a fundamentally good way to dress due to that pre-defined language and culture, but it means that we might be missing out on making new ideas.

This is something that has bothered me a bit recently. I think that when we look back at certain fashion styles of certain decades and periods and subcultures, we can strongly associate some fashions with these time periods and ideas. We associate the 70s with hippies and we associate leather, plaid, and safety pins with punk. We literally have a current aesthetic for Y2K! There’s nothing wrong with engaging with these ideas, they’re all really cool ideas and I engage with them too, I just wish we had a way of moving forward with these ideas towards something new and that feels of this moment.

This is where my problem with the idea of expressing ourselves through a “language of fashion” comes from, mostly through how languages are inherently referential (as a language must already exist for you to be able to speak it). I want new ideas to be created! I want our modern world and themes of our modern world to be captured by the clothes we wear! I feel like by limiting ourselves to pre-existing languages we confine ourselves to the past, which while it can certainly be a useful lens to analyze our current world through, doesn’t necessarily push the letter in terms of what has changed, or what we have learned.

But that makes me question how we can even push the letter now. My experience of fashion, and maybe yours too, is very much so something of nostalgia and continuous references to things of our youth and before. After reading the article earlier by Charlie Caulfield, I ended up asking them on Instagram about this and about how they thought we can dress for the “present”:

In terms of pushing the letter and creating something modern…I thought about which big designers are fulfilling that right now, and I first thought of Jonathan Anderson and Duran Lantink. Both of their sensibilities are very MODERN to me, but they both also reference the past constantly. I think there’s a few factors… Pulling from sources outside of just fashion when thinking about history can lead to something surprisingly fresh (I know Anderson pulls a lot from art), combining several disparate time periods, going directly against the grain of what’s en Vogue, and taking one element that’s already been done and exaggerating it (in size, proportion, color, silhouette, etc.). I think that if you’re a really great designer, stylist, or fashion enthusiast, you can absorb myriad references and visuals, and the context you live in will shape your creation into something that could only exist now, in this moment…I also think it’s a trap to say subversion is always the answer to staying ahead of the trends, because you end up being equally dictated by whatever is popular at the time.

And I am inclined to agree with them! I don’t know for sure how certain ideas came about in the past, or even if the sorts of strike in a pan moments can necessarily be recreated in a way to foster a subcultural community like it would have 50 years ago, but I know that these ideas come from somewhere real. I will certainly be trying to look to the world around me or what I see to pull from, and I’m curious to see where that will take me. It’s certainly what a lot of designers are doing and where they might get their ideas from. There is a lot of inspiration to pull from this world if you’re willing to look.

The language of fashion is an idea that I like a lot and that I agree with. I just think it can be limiting in some capacities that I really care about and want to see grown throughout the future. Hopefully, I’ll be able to start pulling from the present for the way I dress, instead of just the past.