Fashion - Not just a fad

One of the things I hate about being a fashion student, is the perception other people have of it. About a third of the people you tell will give you a disgusted, disinterested, condescending look that means "oh well if you're doing fashion you must be pretty dumb, anyone could do that" when the truth of the matter is, with my grades I could have done anything I'd wanted, but fashion is what I love and what I want to do with my life, and I'm studying at a prestigious university and working very fucking hard. This to the point where half way through a draining 7hour day of garment technology, me and a couple of friends bumped into a friend of a friend while we were having lunch and she started saying how much easier our course was and how she'd swap our practical for her dissertation - even someone at the same university can't appreciate that there has to be a certain level of difficulty for what you're doing to be worth a degree from a prestigiuos Russell group university like Leeds! Just cos people are studying something that ends in 'ology' they presume that it has more integrity than a creative course, when quite often they're just studying for the point of being at university, not really knowing what they want to do with it. I know what I want to do, and I'm working bloody hard to get there, should I really be looked down upon for that?! Fashion is something interesting to study, from understanding how to make something that starts out flat, fit to the body and work with the shapes of the body, to understanding the context of design and where all these patterns, shapes ideas have come from, how they've developed!
I think the problem is that the fashion industry can sometimes seem like it's all about fads, about keeping up with the latest craze, and people that don't want to spend their life following the crowd reject this. But the study of fashion is so much more, and the reason I love fashion is the beautiful, clever, way that garments can be constructed, how they can express a person and how they can flatter a person, and how the confidence given to you by the clothes that you wear can bring so much to your life. As you'll have seen from the work I've uploaded, I've recently been studying Yohji Yamamoto, a conceptual designer who doesn't design to seasonal trends, but instead designs to create something of beauty, he said that he strives for timeless elegance, which is also something I love. He also has a different ideal of beauty than the typical Western image and I find explore different types of beauty really interesting.
I doubt anyone reading this doesn't already love fashion, so I'm probably preaching to the converted here, but it would be great if the fashion industry could get back the respect it deserves, rather than just being seen as an over-commercialised world of fads and crazes which only a fool would buy into.