The Art and Practice of Fashion

Catalog description

The design, production, and dissemination of textiles and clothing have been central to global trade for millennia, and these material products have long been imbued with profound symbolic meanings. Thus, clothing has come to be a vital element in the constitution of a vast number of social hierarchies including gender, race, sexuality, ethnic and nationality, and class. The now established field of fashion studies also engages the business of fashion, which encompasses trade, production, shopping, consumerism, advertising, social media, and celebrity culture. This course will investigate clothes both as artistic creations and as consumer products and will pay particular attention to the interplay between the two. In sum, “Making Fashion: Art, Ethics, and Practice” will engage students in thinking critically about art, cultural production, history, and the rise of consumer capitalism through clothing and the practices of dressing in which students and indeed all individuals participate. While the history of fashion has long been focused primarily on the West since the Renaissance, this class will endeavor to place so-called “birth of fashion” in Europe into its global context by comparing and contrasting the art and practice of fashion around the globe and in an extended chronology. This course is the same as