Janet Hethorn highlights the importance of focusing on people rather than on the garment when it comes to fashion design. She argues that fashion is not only a basic need but also a way to “express meaning and identity”, therefore designers must consider both the physical characteristics of the garment, such as being comfortable and useful, as well as the abstract features, such as style, the consumers’ emotions, etc. One of the problems she exposes about the actual fashion industry is that most of the brands create stereotypes and ideals that do not include most of the people. For instance, she talks about how clothes are modeled by fit people or how even in mannequins clothes look exceptional, because they adjust them in order to achieve this. However, most of us do not have those bodies or silhouettes the garments are made for, therefore it is hard to find something that “fit” us perfectly, And this is precisely the problem, as a lot of times we tend to criticize our own body dimensions according to the garment, rather than criticizing the garment itself, which shows the lack of consumers consideration from the part of the designers. Clothes should be more adjustable to different types of body so they do not represent a major issue when buying them, like the standard sizes do nowadays.
At some point of the text, the author proposes as an exercise, to think about one moment when we felt really fabulous with certain clothes and the opposite. In my case, I have felt fabulous wearing clothes that were both comfortable and stylish, like my red pants that look an feel like pajamas. On the other hand, I have felt so umcomfortable wearing some shirts that felt so rough to my body, but that I have worn because they were part of my middle school uniform or at some other occassions. I can see how important is to have clothes that we like but that are also comfortable.
Finally, when she mentions the emotional attachment we sometimes have to some of our clothes, I thought about my final project idea as I want to analyse my own wardrobe and why I keep storing some clothes I do not really use anymore or not that often. In the part of “Observations”, Hethorn describes things I could do for my own project, such as taking pics and observing which combinations I make of my own clothes in order to understand more my own behaviour towards fashion. This reading gave me some good ideas that I could implement on my final project.