Introduction to Fashion Studies

Catalog description

This seminar examines the many meanings of fashion, design, and style; how values underlying fashion are selected, preserved, denied, reinvented or rethought; how the symbolic meanings and ideological interpretations are connected to creation, production and consumption of fashion goods. Based on an anthropological perspective and framework, this interdisciplinary course will analyze ways in which we can understand fashion through the intersections of many different levels: political, economic, aesthetic, symbolic, religious, etc. The course will study how fashion can help us understand the ways in which tradition and innovation, creativity and technology, localism and globalization, identity and diversity, power and body, are elaborated and interpreted in contemporary society, and in relation to a globalized world. Short videos that can be watched on the computer will be assigned. There are no pre-requisites for this course. In English