The Culture of Fashion: Theories and Practices

Fashion is an economic force, a culture industry and a powerful way to convey identity, politics, status, personality. Fashion can simultaneously express freedom and sexuality, be both democratic and totalitarian and while both repress and control the body and gender roles. A thorough study of the history of fashion in its symbolic, creative and coercive faces, will show how it has been crucial in the construction of national identities in fascist regimes or in the process of decolonization such as India or in the remapping of the world economy including China, India and Brazil. The course will serve as an introduction to allow students an understanding of fashion's contradictory and complex culture and its role and power in the context of global history. Students will get acquainted with the most recent research in fashion studies; will study the methodological theories pertinent to this growing field; and will read recent works such as C. Breward, The Culture of Fashion; R. Arnold, Fashion. A very short introduction; V. Steele, The Berg Companion to Fashion; S. Bruzzi, P. Church Benson eds., Fashion Cultures. Theories, Explorations and Analysis and others.Rationale:This first course for students in the Concentration in Fashion: Theories, Practices, Histories will give them an in depth understanding of the culture of fashion and how it exercises its power. It will also offer a variety of different methodological approaches to fashion and introduce the students to growing research in the new interdisciplinary field of fashion studies. Through the readings students will be encouraged to rethink and cross boundaries among disciplines and between theory and practice in order to understand the complexity of the fashion system.Learning Goals and Outcomes:Upon successful completion of this course, students will demonstrate an understanding of: o Linkages between core theoretical frameworks that have influenced scholarship in the field of fashion studies and related disciplines in the humanities and the social sciences, exploring issues such as the body, identity, gender and sexuality, aesthetics and politics; o Methods of bridging empirical and theoretical inquiry; o Academic professional development; o Organizing and providing critical discussion for public lectures and presenting original scholarship.

Offer as needed

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