Fashion as a Medium to Build Identity: "Self"

Marta Ibañez Jimenez

The idea to go deeper into the topic of identity comes from Marta Jimenez's personal experience. As a person who has struggled to find themselves and their place, this is a topic close to the designers heart. Having never been a very vocal person, clothing was the main way of expression and it played a big role in being sensed by others, and finding who a person is and where they belong.

As I started to get interested in other disciplines, such as graphic design, a lot of questions started arising; mainly related to social movements and fashion, its music and the preferred brands and aesthetics that always went hand by hand with specific ethics and ideologies. All of this opened my eyes, and I realized everything was connected.

I  wanted to buy certain brands and items, not because I simply liked them or they were good quality, but because of the values that these seemed to have implicit in them and the kind of people who would wear them, I wanted to be one of them. I felt identified.

It wouldn’t be until later that I realized these were meanings given to certain aesthetics and items by different social groups, and brands would see an opportunity (not necessarily in a bad way) to fulfill this need we had to signify ourselves and belong to a social group.

From this train of thought and my fascination for fashion publications, «SELF» was born, I felt the necessity to listen to what the creatives from the world of fashion had to say about it and share it.