현대패션에 표현된 키치(Kitsch)연구

A Study on Kitsch in Modern Fashion

The purpose of this dissertation is to interpret fashion through a socio-cultural phenomenon called kitsch by understanding its aesthetic characteristics and clarifying its significance in the modern consumer society and analyzing the examples of kitsch appearing in modern fashion. The following are the arguments and conclusion of this dissertation. First kitsch has negative meanings such as aesthetic inadequacy or bad tastes implying vulgar popular tastes of faked sensations just imitating elite culture and using things indiscriminately for inferior reproduction or at best the philosophical and aesthetic category that expresses the mass of people's attitudes toward life in accepting the consumer culture of the industrial society. It started from the art of romanticism accompanied by th commercializing of art with the bourgeois society background formed in the mid-19th century. Though kitsch started to prevail following the socio-cultural changes caused by the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century it is only in the late 20th century that kitsch has come tc our everyday life and has become an object of aesthetic arguments. Second formative characteristics of kitsch appearin in fashion have a cumulative inadequate romantic pleasure-seeking satirizing and multicomplex nature. Third the socio-cultural meanings of kitsch appearing in fashion are as follows: The extension of commercialism which gratifies the pleasure-seeking mass consumers the enlargement of the aesthetic category by inclining to everyday commonplace aesthetic sense the expression of one's identity through the gratification of desire and the new aesthetics of resistance and deviance by an anti-traditional and anti-elite tendency towards the traditional society and aesthetic values.