Detournement is the revolutionary act of changing around the structure of an item to express a new meaning and its true colors. For example, imagine you’re walking down a busy street cluttered with graffiti and your attention is grabbed by a collage of a beautiful woman dressed very fashionable and trendy. However, you look super close and you notice that her image is made up of a bunch of tiny pictures of giant piles of thrown away clothing cluttering the streets of India. After you stop and think about it you realize the artist is trying to say that fashion trends are doing more harm than good and although the woman is beautiful, the reason behind her clothing is not. Would this move you? Convince you of the artist’s opinion? Inspire you to fight for change?
According to philosophers Guy Depord and Gil J. Wolman, detournement needs to happen within artistic practices in order to lead to much needed societal changes. Conformity in fashion trends is much more prevalent these days with the rise in social media. Campuses are filled with individuals who dress the same because they were influenced by a stranger on their tiny portable screen. I myself fall prey to these manipulations and end up feeling an intense need to purchase a shirt to feel as beautiful and authentic as everyone else. This issue of fashion conformity is leading to less individuality and creativity amongst youth which could be detrimental to personal growth and development. Detournement can be used to spread awareness about discovering your true aesthetic rather than copying the masses. Detournement of artwork can be inspiring and lead to massive change surrounding this issue.
I find myself spending loads of money on pieces of clothing that I don’t necessarily like or feel comfortable in because I saw some girl on the internet wearing it and I wanted to be just like her. Detournement can be used to change that video to represent the horrors of everyone looking and dressing the same. For example, the extremity could show that by trying to conform to what everyone else is wearing, in turn, you may end up looking boring to the outside eye. A piece of artwork could portray this by drawing a crowd of different looking people but they are all wearing the exact same thing. A viewer could look at this artwork and think about the negatives of looking the same as your peers.
An issue with this movement could be that it would receive a lot of backlash for being constrictive not letting people express themselves however they want. To combat this backlash, you can simply explain how conformity is a psychological idea that is backed by research. Therefore, conformity is a real aspect of society that needs to be addressed. The next idea might be that conformity isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Conformity could lead to inclusivity and friendship. Whether you think that conformity is a good thing or you think conformity is a bad thing, there is no question that detournement in artwork could be used as a way to spread awareness about conformity in fashion trends. Maybe it will only reach one person but then that individual will find themselves and their identity and no longer dress a certain way because their peers do.
