The Symbols of the Body Image Expressed in Modern Fashion Design

현대 패션디자인에 표현된 신체이미지의 상징성

This study is intended to understand an implication system and significance in the current community which a body image symbolizes by correlating it with fashion that is on the rise as a principal issue in various fields. For this study, the symbolism of the body image was contemplated in terms of philosophy and art, and then on the basis of it, the symbolism of the body image shown in modern fashion design was analyzed through fashion works. The research results are as follows, 1. The manifestation of sex can be taken as the symbolism of the body image which is expressed in modern fashion design. Recently sexual chaos and vagueness such as homosexuality and bisexuality are expressed through a dress and its ornaments. Though displaying sexual characteristics of male and female as they are exposing a sign or a diagram, decorating a part of body or representing sex in garments, uncertain sex identity in modern society is manifested in dress and its ornaments. It is to deny absoluteness regarding sex and emphasize diversity indwelt in human beings, and after all it shows to pursue the human essence. 2. Another symbolism of the body image is body expression as the human race and an ethnic group. The discriminating situations and the restoration of their status appeared in modern fashion too. Moreover, their cultures and issues came to alter the aesthetic standard of body made from a view of the Western white supremacist. Hereupon, fashion trends like ethnic fashion, Orientalism and African look etc. appear according to this tendency, which represents race and national identity and in addition, which signifies to present transcendental human conception embracing alienated human conception. 3. The symbolism of the body image expressed in a body, and a dress and its ornaments as nature can be considered in terms of the concern on environmental contamination and the respect of echo system. Getting away from reigning over, developing and stamping down nature at their will, the human beings pursue unity with nature, which is described in fashion. They are stressing that natural materials and objects such as animal, plant and soil etc. should activily be introduced into fashion and humans are a communal fate group and should reframe their status in nature at last. 4. The body image shown in a body, a dress and its ornaments as technology is transformed and recreated by modern scientific techniques and medical science to show post human conception namely, forthcoming future human conception as a cyborg which loses individual identity. This presents a perfect future human conception with high level of preternatural power but after all, leaves us a task to seek the meaning of human existence in alienation caused by the loss of human identity and existence. In this manner, the moderns crave for perceiving the identity of a natural human being in the current thoughts tendency of the modern times such as postmodernism, post structuralism, deconstructionism, feminism and so on, which build discussions affecting the art and fashion worlds. The categories, like sexual characteristics indwelt in a human body, racial classifications, the natural environment surrounding human beings and development of science, bring out the importance of the internal and external meaning in today's fashion which a human body contains, and present sew human conception in the coming future society.