You own your status from brand products? (By Carol Yeung)

       

     In old days, human wear clothes for one reason only-utility, but nowadays people seems like to classify contemporary fashion as a kind of vehicle to show social status more than just cover their body. It is because nowadays the social concept about wealth is different, most people would think that high-valued goods can establish the line of the class distinction; also they believed that the famous brand fashion can reflect the standard of a person and to consolidate their socioeconomic and status positions, o people like to build up their status and confident by pursuing famous brand fashion.     

     Fashion can be classify as a form of communication, it acts as a nonverbal language that through its symbols conveys some specific meaning and message to the viewers, moreover, fashion also represent the value of identity with a particular peer group.       

     Take famous brand Louis Vuitton as an example. Louis Vuitton is a man. Before Louis Vuitton create the brand, he is the imperial use designer of Napoleon and his wife, In 1854s, He use his own name to create his brand, the target market is for the noble and aristocrat at that time, so many empress and president became the clients of him. At the result, the products of Louis Vuitton symbolize how high class and noble it is. So today, people trust that the people who use Louis Vuitton must get identification from the society about they are status as an upper class. The reasons above shows that why people interest to buy Louis Vuitton because consumption express and demonstrate class differences, some product like Louis Vuitton are mainly advertised to some particular group.  

     According to “The Theory of the Leisure Class” which written by Veblen, he said that those people with high status occupations will wear the clothes to show statue and dressing for status as an outward expression of wealth. Therefore nowadays people like to wear famous brand fashion hope use those products to show others about that they are belong to that particular group. In addition, they realized that famous brand fashion could be determined one’s position before perple speak to each other; it is one of the most easily exhibited symbols of status available. For example only high position person could wear sandals in ancient Egypt, the Greeks and Roman classify people status by different colour. For today, normal clothing are not enough to show position, fashion which have the popular brand names is necessary for people to build up their social status.     

     But I think that most of the people put too much focus on those famous brand fashion, they already subvert the meaning of fashion and consumption, even the concept of society. It is because different style of fashion will suitable for different people but teenagers just care about how expensive the clothes is, if this trend continue, their personal value will be changed and focus on the money more than the personal identity. the peer pressure will push more people finally to follow into this trend and built a negative cyclation.  

Reference: 

http://www.fashion-and-style.org/page-1/history-of-louis-vuitton-handbags.html

Mix and Match Clothing Culture in Hong Kong (By Sean Sit)

     ‘Putting all brand products on the body is rustic; the most important thing is matching!’ This is said by a famous fashion designer. And this sentence matched the popular fashion trend of teenagers in Hong Kong nowadays. There are more teenagers using one or two brand products match with some relatively cheap clothes or wearing one style of clothes with another style of clothes. This is so called mix and match and has become a trend.    

     Years before, teenagers tend to chase brand products like a flock of ducks. They think that brand products could provide them higher status among others; once they own any of these brand products they got recognition from peers, so they were willing to spend much to buy a set of brand products. Now they are not willing to buy in sets but only one or two. A reason which causes this atmosphere is the drop of Hong Kong economy. This reason decreases the consuming power of the teenagers in Hong Kong. On the other hand, they are also stopped chasing brand products, they are trying to build their own image and self identity. Moreover, as time goes by, fashion trend has become free and personalized. Like Japan and France Paris, their fashion styles are become free styles, for example they use famous brand handbag but wearing simply clothes as a match, their acts marked the latest trend of fashion.     

     Mix and match is a kind of techniques how you wear clothes. The most important point for this skill is the match is pleasing to eye. While you match them efficiently, the result will become trendy and mould. One of the matching methods is using new clothes match with old clothes. Vintage look has supported by teenagers recently, because matching vintage clothes is a kind of arts. Lining them well is difficult, teenagers think this could be a challenge and it is seldom has contradiction with others.

     Free from the lock of the brand clothes, while Hi-End may not welcome by all the people. So mixing different brand clothes can also form special styles. Because different brands could have varied designing styles and characteristics, if mixing them together, it brings creative and aesthetic feel. Like crossing an Yves Saint Laurent shirt with a Giordano jean! It is also fashion. In addition, Chinese clothes and Western clothes always give strongly opposite styles. Like cheongsam not much people could dare dress it oneself, but when eastern crashed with western, the result maybe out of your mind that good. I think mix and match clothing is the main stream of nowadays fashions. On my own, I also mix and match, while wearing brand product is like taking a risk, if you see a person who is wearing the same cloth with you, this is quite embarrassed. Built up self image is difficult, most of the teens including me is searching the way to. Once you find your own suitable style, your self confidence will be increased. So from now, be creative and search your own image.

HK’s TV drama – local production by TVB (by Sam Chung)

I really don’t know I am a violent guy or not, but every time when I looked at my television showing local soap drama at late night, I always come up with an idea of drawing out a gun from my pocket and shoot the TV (although I don’t own any firearm). I know it is not right to come up with this idea but I am quite sure that I have started to find these local dramas irritates me. The two Hong Kong most biggest TV broadcast company,TVB and ATV, tend to produce non-sense soap opera. However, most of the Hong Kong family are still like to have dinner while their eyes are watching these kind of stupid, repetitive and somehow standardized program.

I’d say the most latest example of this kind of program is the long soap opera of TVB consist of 60 freaking long chapters, over-complicated relationships among the characters and over-did coincidences between them to make them enemies of each other and suddenly another things happened then they become friends again having the same target to work on or having the same enemy to fight for. At this point I think you know what I am talking about, this is ‘The Drive of Life (《歲月風雲》) ‘ which just have its last chapter shown on 5th Oct.

Actually I don’t mind there will be a drama with people having confusing relations and conflicts between them. But this genre of show is being produced like Zaku MS in Gundam animate – it is way toooooo much!!! I guess what TVB was thinking is the opera talking something about ‘your wife is the worst enemy of my best friend’s ex-girlfriend’s classmate’, ‘conflict deep inside where people don’t know’, ‘fighting under the table’, etc are going to ‘work’ as they find that the recent show called War And Beauty (《金枝慾孽》) had created hot topics among the audience. And so TVB try to reproduce something like that such as The Dance of Passion (《火舞黃沙》) and Heart of Greed (《溏心風暴》)and here comes of The Drive of Life. The producer are really crazy on making these, thinking this is the best formula of getting audience. They are repeating the same formula. For me it totally bad of not trying more new idea on TV drama but just copying idea recently shown that everyone know you are just copying ( do it count as plagiarism? TVB is plagiarizing its own work! LOL).

However, this kind of genre is still holding quite a number of audience. May be this genre is easy to understand as people living in capital modern city are too exhausted after work so they are lazy on commenting on bad work media made for them, or somehow they try to stuff themselves this kind of programmes as they actually have no choice, since Hong Kong only have 2 TV broadcasting company and most of the time ATV suck making its own product (in fact, ATV doesn’t know how to attract stable amount of audience), so watching the drama of TVB is becoming (and it used to be) a local culture of Hong Kong, no matter how non-sense it is going to be.

Sam Chung

SamXjones