124262 KO Critical Media Analysis (2017S)

This course will investigate what fashion is and how fashion and what we wear relates to identity, history, and other dimensions of culture. We will particularly look at the function of fashion as a marker of sexual, ethnic, gender, national, class and other cultural identities. Students will be familiarized with theories and concepts that account for how such cultural identities and differences are not only constructed and perpetuated, but can also be challenged both through fashion as representation and representations of fashion.

A second concern of this course will be the notion of fashion as art. Over the course of history, the question ‘Is fashion art?’ has elicited a variety of responses, and it is a question that continues to divide opinions, even among fashion editors, journalists and designers. In recent years, however, the number of museums and exhibitions dedicated to fashion has been on the rise, challenging common conceptions of fashion as trivial, disposable, and ephemeral due to the fickle reign of ‘la mode’.

Without aiming to provide any decisive argument to support either side in the ongoing ‘Is fashion art?’ debate, the course will explore ways in which garments have recently been framed as works of art in an attempt to elevate fashion from “the foam on the ocean of vulgarity” (H.G. Wells quoted in Barnard, 2007, p. 13) to “high art, the very best that has been thought and achieved in Western civilization” (Barnard, 2007, p. 13).

In the process, students will be familiarized with (1) the vocabulary for a formal analysis of fashion and its representations (2) theories and conceptual frameworks that are used in order to identify, analyse and critically explain the production and consumption of fashion (3) art-historical approaches to fashion.