Aesthetics: Seminar thoughts.

Fashion and the idea of taste are inextricably linked. They are also culturally and temporarily specific.
Its subjective and therefore difficult to know what excatly taste is.

Issues:
1. Professional issues: How does institute create taste.
2. Revivals and Retro: Is it possible for fashion to really return.
3. Issues of taste and identity: e.g androgyny and Mary Quant. She wanted to do away with the idea that girls turn into their mums. Shifted signifiers of women and taste away from the traditional.
Androgynous look sought to redifine markers of taste.

Taste is temporal and the markers of taste can be changed.
Taste is not a succession
Taste was an object that was owned by the old and middle and upper classes, she refuted the idea that cheap fashion couldn't be tasteful.

Fashion and bad taste:
Alexander Mcqueen Highland Rape (1995)
Gareth Pugh

As their reputations rise on the basis of bad taste their designs become tasteful.
The design has not changed it is our relationship to it that changes, our reception to it changes.