Fashion as System or Action Net in ‘Fashion in All Things’ : a Case in Color Design of Mobile Phones

Contemporary fashion has permeated into all things in life beyond clothes. Recently, fashion theories take on interests in organization and system. Kawamura proposes a fashion system through which clothing is transformed into the idea of fashion. Can this fashion system be used to analyze other things in fashion? We present a study using mobile phone, one of the most intimate gadgets to people, as a way to approach ‘fashion in all things’. We chose the color as a way to study the fashion aspect in mobile design. Through the empirical study, we find that the decision making of color in mobile industry is a collective process. It is greatly influenced by technology, materials, consumer lifestyle and trend. The trendy colors in mobile design are not defined by certain cultural or social institutions, but formulated by actions conducted by various actors in certain social context. Our study shows that fashion can embrace more than Kawamura’s system, e.g. the action net of color design in mobile technology. Although mobile design shares some similarities with clothing fashion, the concept of fashion-ology is very Parisian and deals with only clothing. It is not fully applicable to mobile industry. If we want to use a fashion system that can apply to fashion in all things, we should revisit the theory to reveal the general characteristics of the fashion world or build smaller theory for each category.