Racialized Fashions Post

For this week’s reading, I really enjoyed reading about cultural appropriation vs. cultural cultural appreciation. I think it is so relevant in our daily lives, as we encounter fashion trends all the time, and are constantly exposed to them. I also think this video really errs on the side of cultural appropriation, as the Teen Vogue video embodies seven women embracing their culture through fashion. I think that the Pham reading really embodies the struggle between appropriation and appreciation, as she discusses a high fashion company, Céline, creating bags that resembled bags that one would see “ over canal street.” Pham says  “many [people] saw it as a continuation of the fashion industry’s long history of poaching marginalized peoples”.  The video that I’ve chosen has seven women speaking about their culture, discussing how it is offensive when people don’t understand the meanings behind their cultural fashion and just try to adopt the trend. Additionally, it applies to one of the Keywords for this week, Valdivia’s “Othering”. She describes othering as “a strategy that reinforces the mainstream by differentiating individuals and groups and relegating them to the margins according to a range of socially constructed categories” (133). If the public buys into adopting these cultural trends without fully understanding the meanings behind it, it is detrimental to the culture that it is represented and reinforcing the “other” as it’s some foreign thing that looks cute as a fashion trend. I used iMovie to incorporate Teen Vogue’s video, as well as added in separate audio and added in examples of the cultural appropriation of their culture that occurred before showing the gorgeous women embracing their own culture. The quote that I used seemed very relevant to these women’s viewpoints.