Using autopoiesis to discover the birth of fashion

Abstract

How personal and social fashion might be formed at a nascent level is detectable in the Mursi and Omo people. These groups remained within the African continent after its post-Pangaea formation; the Mursi and Omo have retained practices and beliefs that hitherto have not been considered critical to the formation of fashion. Fashion scholarship has followed a limited version of history that permeates museology, teaching and fashion design. Its impetus responds to the idea that fashion was formed in Bruges, Belgium, during the birth of capitalism, between 1280 and 1390. Clothes created before 1280 in non-European settings has generally been regarded as costume, hence the epistemological gap that stymies an inclusivity scholarship. This development has ramifications for a reconsideration of when the historical gaze commences, and where geographically it falls. Indeed, fashion is reconsidered to be inordinately autochthonous. This is an examination of post-structuralism as applied to a visual system via human presentation and social autopoiesis, a system that reproduces itself and does so without requiring external operations for the system for continuation. The activity of fashion visualized is examined as a claim of a live system that stresses the study of the individual and the group as an activity for self-actualization. The relative freedom in which the Mursi and Omo peoples of Ethiopia create fashion is discussed as opposed to the lack of autonomy available to formal fashion designers working in the West and particularly those being trained and educated in fashion schools. This article refutes Barthesian concepts of fashion for three reasons. First, Barthes grounded his scope within the venture of the fashion industrial complex and its profit agenda, served by mechanisms such as fashion photography, advertising and promotion. Second, Barthes’ work concerns an exposition of semiotics where fashion is merely the subject of containment. Lastly, the establishment of fashion is a creative act concerning the human body, since no evidence can be proffered to decipher which came first – human making marks on the land, trees or cave walls, or mark-making on live human skin. I proceed with the idea that the Omo provide a glimpse of the birth of fashion in that they make the step of distancing themselves from nature by re-creating themselves as objectified and in the world.