• Journal of Fashion Business
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• v.20 no.5
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• pp.1-15
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• 2016

The purpose of this study is to interpret the artistic nature of fashion from the point of view of George Dickie's Institutional theory of art, which defined art from a sociological context. Five notions to formulate the institutional definition of art were regarding the artist, work of art, public, artworld, and artworld system. These notions were applied to the fashion world, and they deduced the definitions of a fashion designer, a fashion product, a fashion consumer, and the fashion system, which indicated fashion's social status in the art system. Firstly, a fashion designer plays a collective role in the product with an understanding of the consumers, professional knowledge of the design, and knowledge of making images of fashion products. Secondly, a fashion product involves artifactuality in the form of clothes created by collaboration among producers and it is transformed into fashion by collective activity of distributors and consumers. Thirdly, a consumer is a set of people who play a leading role in the assessment and consumption of the fashion product, allow the fashion designer to read his or her taste and reflect it in the fashion product although they are not directly involved in its production. Fourthly, a fashion system is a social framework for the presentation of a fashion product by a fashion designer to a consumer, and a social institution which enables clothes to transform into fashion through design, production, display, distribution, and sales. As a result, fashion is defined as an artifact in the form of clothes created by a fashion designer and presented to a consumer by the fashion system.