Showing manifestation of current visual arts through Fashion

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Image 1: Showing manifestation of current visual arts through Fashion
This images was taken from the September spring fashion collections of 2008, an event that takes place each year in New York. The photographer of the image is not known but the image appeared in the New York magazine. Cultural codes in this case refers to the cultural features or signs encoded in the image that viewers can interpret to understand the culture presented in the image. The cultural codes used are meant to shift attention from the image producers toward viewer’s response to understand how the image creates the cultural meaning. The cultural codes that might be at play in the use of the image is the use of fashion or certain type of outfit that seeks to create a romanticized Orient. The cultural codes seeks to portray the allusion to imaginary Orient/East through fashion.
The knowledge that western readers need to have in order to interpret certain messages of this image is the concept of orientalism today which refers to understanding of a stranger or ‘the other’ person different from you. The concept of orientalism encompasses people, religion, country, race or gender unfamiliar or different from us. The image above was aimed at retaliating Edward Said’s theory in his book Orientalism which argues that depictions of the West on the Orient are driven by the historical European colonialism and aim of a political domination over the East. That perception by Said distorts the visual art and well-mean...