Our concept: Fashion

The interruption and style of our Cats production, to make it challenging and unique but also fitting in and obeying the demands of the text is the concept of fashion.

When first discovering about the concept we were basing our production on, ideas and costume designs rushed into my head. Costume would now be twice as important in this production as it originally was due to fashion mainly means clothes, treads through them and how people create a visual profile of themselves, an identity through the style and colours of costume they wear.

My character, Gus, in relation to the fashion world I think would be a designer or a retired one who even now is respected and idolised by the fashion industry and the rest of the characters. He could also possible be a retired model that whilst in his prime used to be the most well-known and fearless model out there, a model that would scare off all competition with one step down a cat walk.

Fashion in general:

Trend

Fashion is a huge contributor to what clothing gets popular; trend is the main success aim of a clothing design business, to create an image in which people would wear and influence other people to wear similar clothing.

A massive provider of trend amongst public is celebrities as they are the most popular type of role model for teenagers and young adults these days, which are also the main target audience for the fashion industry as teenagers are growing and needing new clothes every year and feeling complied to ‘fit in’ with the articles of clothing which is currently trending. An example of this is ‘Ugg boots’ which became popular in 2005, and since has become a common teen’s footwear.

Similarly to young adults, some would feel the ‘need’ to fit in with social groups. MASLOW’s hierarchy of needs suggests that being a part and accept in a social group is one of the necessities everyone needs to have to reach their full potential as a person, meaning if clothing is the one barrier which needs to be crossed for someone to achieve the best of their ability then the fashion industry have made the perfect product, a product customers feel they actually need not want.

I feel trend in my character, Gus, isn’t the most important thing to him as he is already well respected by the other characters and if I aim to base him off a designer he would be the one creating the trends.

Identity

Many people believe clothing is important to show the individuality of a person, an example of this is in the colours someone wears; red for example has connotations of passion and love, whereas black has mystery and power. Another form of this is the style of clothing someone might where as well how they are influenced by trend compared to others. The clothing and colours worn by an individual can give a great insight into what type of person they are as well as helping their personality traits to be exaggerated and all contributing to create a specific visual identity.

Identity in the sense of my character would be more performance orientated as Gus isn’t someone you should judge by what you see. Mainly because I aim to keep what he wears plain and formal, but to show his creative side and how he has many different traits he has gained from performing a wide range of diverse characters his tie/bow-tie he will be wearing throughout the musical will change in style and colour drastically whilst his suit will stay the same in almost all of the scenes.

Gus's main identity will be based by his plain old fashioned suit as it will show his current traits of being old but classy, smart and a sense of experienced as suits are generally worn by successful people.