What is the difference between fashion and clothing tags?

Question

After asking this question I realized, that there is a clothing tag (I used that one) and a fashion tag. And now I wonder, whether I should retag my question.

To make this question more useful generally:

• What is the difference between those two tags? What is the meaning of each tag?
• When to use which? Possibly use both?
• Or should they be merged and additional tags to clarify things be used?

Here's my understanding:

1. Clothing is more oriented towards the actual materials used, the tailoring and production.

   Note that this could also be gained by adding some other tag that makes it more specific, like "production" or "materials".

2. While fashion is more oriented to how things finally look and what people used to wear at different occassions.

   For this one an "etiquette" tag could clarify things too.

Answer 1

Personally I do not think they are synonyms.

The clothing tag is much more functional in nature, whereas fashion is not necessarily functional. You could ask the question "What was the clothing of choice for 16th century foot soldiers?" and the question "What was the fashion aesthetic of choice for 16th century foot soldiers?" and you aren't asking the same same question. I don't really feel like one is a subset of the either.

Your question is analogous to saying that "buildings" and "architecture" are synonyms. I think the two should remain separate and would not support a retagging campaign.

Answer 2

They're close enough to synonyms given the commonality of scholarly interest over these domains.

Answer 3

Looking the two tags over, there is a bit of a difference. There are some questions tagged clothing that it would be a stretch to call "fashion", eg: the question asking if Celts really didn't wear any into battle, and many under fashion that aren't specifically clothing related, for example the question about flappers.

That being said, I see clothing as very nearly a subset of fashion. By that logic, I don't suppose I'd have a huge problem if someone went on a retagging campaign to make them all simply fashion.