The functions of fashion include the ability to construct, predict, distribute and implement certain values and samples of behaviour, to form the entity's tastes and manage them. Fashion complements the traditional forms of culture through their turning by modernity and constructs on this basis a new human environment and.
Clothing and costumes
Even though the terms are often used together
fashion differs from clothing and costumes
"clothing" describes the material and technical
garment; "costume" has come to mean fancy-dress
or masquerade wear. "Fashion," by contrast,
describes the social and temporal system that
"activates" dress as a social signifier in a certain time
and context.
The economic function
The economic function of fashion is associated with its dynamism: the fashion is ahead of physical wear of the subject moral and, consequently, provides the industry in demand for a new, constantly clearing the market for sales.
Fashion, or one’s own personal style, functions as a “societal formation always combining two opposite principles. It is a socially acceptable and secure way to distinguish oneself from others and, at the same time, it satisfies the individual’s need for social adaptation and imitation”.
Clothing fashions
Fashion is a form of expression. Fashion is what people wear in a specific context. If a stranger would appear in this setting, adorning something different, the stranger would be considered "out of fashion."
West Africa fashion
Additionally, there is a long history of fashion in West Africa. The Cloth was used as a form of currency in trade with the Portuguese and Dutch as early as the 16th Century. Locally produced cloth and cheaper European imports were assembled into new styles to accommodate the growing elite class of West Africans and resident gold and slave traders. There was an exceptionally strong tradition of cloth-weaving in Oyo and the areas inhabited by the Igbo people.