ABSTRACT
There has always been some awareness that clothing plays an important role in social life. But it has never been clear the extent to which clothes, in the form of visual images that transmit meaning, act to integrate organizations and structures with their functions. Familiarity with these images makes society's patterns of interaction visible. When seeking to understand the meaning of a cultural expression, knowing something about the author's purpose and social situation is at the center of valid interpretation, suggested literary critic E. D. Hirsch, Jr., art historian Michael Baxandall and sociologist Wendy Griswold. Designers respond to the period's ideas and tensions with styles they believe are relevant. Like other artists and authors, they seize upon a prevailing perception and build a line around it. The fashion reflected a specific type of sexiness that came to characterize the end of the 1990s.
