FASHION STUDIES:
Fashion Film: The Cultures of Fashion (Spring 2014)
As industries and cultural manifestations, fashion and film share many qualities and have always influenced each other in a number of ways. Both are spectacle and performance; both are bound up with emotions, with desire, with modernity and processes of modernization. At the level of representation, film and fashion share the creation of a culture and a discourse, the practice of desire and an endless process of emulation, imitation, and consumption choices. Or as a critic has put it : “Film, in this guise of dress, of appearance and artifice, is an extension of the fashion industry.”
While focusing on the present and particularly on the new phenomenon of the “Fashion Film,” the course offers historical and critical frameworks with which to investigate new ways of understanding the relationship between art/commerce; industry/culture; body/identity; time/space; image/imagining and, the aesthetic/anaesthetic.
The course explores how the fashion film, which has recently exploded thanks to advancements in digital technology, has in fact a long history that can be traced back to the emergence of cinema in the late 19th century. The course explores not only this new cinematic form in multiple contexts and frameworks, which connect it to photography, the fashion show, movement, time, and branding, but also explores the politics of experimental forms of communication, aesthetics, cultures and identity.
Authors and filmmakers examined include: Walter Benjamin, Michelangelo Antonioni, Laura Mulvey, Francesco Casetti, Lev Manovich, Wong Kar-wai, Mary Ann Doane, Federico Fellini, Alfred Hitchcock, Jessica Mitrani, William Klein, Caroline Evans, Tom Gunning, Thomas Elsaesser, and scholars who have written on the new genre of the Fashion Film such as Marketa Uhlirova, Natalie Khan, Nick Reese-Roberts and others.
Sample of Student Work produced for the course by Christopher Vitale, Link below:
http://trendsaretrending.wordpress.com
FashionFilm Journal by William Lorenzo:
http://macaulay.cuny.edu/eportfolios/fashionfilm/fashion-film-review/
LINK to FASHION FILM SITE: https://fashionfilm.commons.gc.cuny.edu
Clothing Cultures in Early Modern Italy and England
This course will examine the clothing culture of early modern Italy and England, and will focus in particular on the way that dress was used to fashion the body and to construct social distinctions. In particular, the course will investigate why, how and where fashion came to the fore in early modern societies, establishing itself as a threat to morality, religious beliefs, and as a vehicle that bore on gender, class and ethnic definitions. Drawing on a broad interdisciplinary framework, the course will focus on texts belonging to the English and Italian literary traditions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, reading them in the context of material culture and the visual arts. We will read texts from genres such as treatises, novellas, plays, poetry, satires, and costume books. From these texts and secondary critical sources, we will see how dress (or any kind of ornamentation that covered the body) became a cause for concern for the State and Church. These two institutions sought to control individual vanity and any desire to transgress the law and accepted societal codes. It was at this time that fashion became an institution of modernity and expanded its definition beyond dress to include behavior, manners, national character and identity.
POSSIBLE TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION INCLUDE:
- The sumptuary laws from the period that prescribed the types and styles of fabrics that could be worn by persons of various ranks.
- The importance of clothing and fashion in court culture, especially as discussed by Castiglione in The Courtier.
- The significance of clothing and accessories in public space. In hierarchical environments, but also the street, rituals, parades, spectacles etc.
- The significance of costumes on the early modern stage, both symbolically and materially (some influential critics have recently claimed that the public theater was closely linked – from an economic perspective – with the trade in second-hand clothing).
- The role that accessories of dress like the codpiece and farthingale played in materializing masculinity and femininity, as well as the cultural context and significance of gendered crossdressing (both inside and outside the playhouses).
- The use of cosmetics, and especially their relationship to the formation of racial ideals.
- The practice of forcing members of religious groups to wear specific forms of dress (Shylock, for example, mentions his “Jewish gabardine” in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice). There are articles on Jews wearing markers in order to distinguish them from Christians
- The erotics of dress in love poetry, and in everyday life. Historians have recently begun to explore the complex ways that Italian courtesans used clothing and fashion.
- The vestarian controversy of post-Reformation England, in which reformers argued against the use of traditional religious garbs such as the surplice, alb, cope and chasuble.
POSSIBLE PRIMARY TEXTS
Castiglione, The Courtier
Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker, The Roaring Girl
Thomas Dekker, The Shoemaker’s Holiday
The polemical pamphlets about crossdressing such as Hic Mulier and Haec Vir
Robert Greene’s satirical pamphlet A Quaint Dispute between Velvet Breeches and Cloth Breeches (1592).
Cesare Vecellio, Habiti Antichi et Moderni di tutto il mondo (Excerpts) and Giacomo Franco, Habiti, (excerpts)
Niccolo’ Machiavelli, The Prince and Belfagor (excerpts)
Pietro Aretino, The School of Whoredom
Lucrezia Marinella, The Nobility and Excellence of Women,and the Defects and Vices of Women (Excerpts)
Lodovico Ariosto, Orlando Furioso and Torquato Tasso, Gerusalemme Liberata (Excerpts, issues of gender, transvetism, armor etc)
Arcangela Tarabotti, Antisatira (I’ll provide translations of excerpts) there is a great discussion on masculinity, dress and vanity.
Giovanni Lampugnani, Of the rented carriage (another great text on issues of masculinity, “national identity” (Italian fashion versus French etc, I will provide Translations for the excerpts)
On Beauty, platonic love, erotic love etc, (I can prepare excerpts from different texts)
POSSIBLE SECONDARY/THEORETICAL TEXTS
Peter Stallybrass and Ann Rosalind Jones, Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory
Pierre Bourdieu, Outline for a Theory of Practice (especially his notion of the habitus) and Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste
Michel De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life
Judith Butler’s ideas about gender performativity as articulated in Gender Trouble,Bodies that Matter, and Undoing Gender
Anne Hollander, Seeing through Clothes
Daniele Roche, The Cultures of Appearances
Aileen Ribeiro, Dress and Morality
Giorgio Riello, McNeill Peter, eds. The Fashion History Reader
Evelyn Welch, Shopping in the Renaissance
Roland Barthes, The Language of Fashion
Georg Simmel, “Fashion”
Rebecca Arnold, Fashion. A very brief Introduction (OUP)
Susan Vincent, Dressing the Elite. Clothes in Early Modern England
New York Fashion:
The Fabric of Cultures. Fashion, Identity, Globalization
The course studies fashion in New York as an industry, an economic force, a mechanism that creates and performs identities; and a vehicle that fosters interplay between gender, the body and sexuality. We will begin with New York and the birth of American fashion, from the gilded age and continuing till the present. We will examine the contribution of women who have worked in the fashion industry as designers, stylists, journalists (such as the New York-based Claire McCardell, Elizabeth Hawes, Diana Vreeland, Jo Copeland and others). The course will investigate the socio-cultural context out of which these women emerged; the relationship the city of New York has with fashion and modernity; with fashion’s role as a creator of national and local identities and image.
Particular attention will be given to periods of great transformation in the history of New York when fashion plays a full role in shaping the city’s culture and identity, and has an impact on lifestyles and gender perception in the workplace and in other social and private spaces. The course will cover a time-span going from the sweatshops of the second half of the nineteenth century where Jewish and Italian immigrants worked to the emergence of the “American Look” in the 1930s and 1940s, on to the subsequent shifts that occurred in the 1960s, up until the present of the New York Fashion week and New York as a global fashion capital.
A reading packet will be available on Blackboard. Other books are available at libraries or can be purchased through Amazon or any other sources.
The Business of Fashion
This course considers the aesthetic markets of fashion, in which value and price are determined by ineffable factors such as taste, mood, and social climate. SItuating fashion across the various sectors of the industry, from production, to branding, to the models who promote the styles and the consumers who buy them, Students will be exposed to a selection of readings across a range of topics including selections from works by Pierre Bourdieu, Don Slater, Sharon Zukin, Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu, Mimi Nguyen, Nancy Green, Ashley Mears, Joanne Entwistle, Nigel Thrift, Alison Hearn, Thorsten Veblen, and Pietra Rivoli. This range of topics includes global labor flows within the garment industry; a select history of fashion production practices; a sociology of shopping; various treatments of consumers and consumption; an ethnography of the modeling industry; critical discussions of branding and luxury markets; technology and innovation; fast fashion; eco fashion; and sustainability. Each student will research and write in one of these areas, culminating in a final project aimed at sharing this research.
Fashion, Power and Space
Description to come.
FASHION AND OTHER DISCIPLINES:
Each semester students at the Graduate Center who are interested in pursuing their research interests in fashion and have completed the two required courses for the Concentration in Fashion Studies can take courses offered in other Programs and Departments @ the GC.
Here is a sample list of appropriate and approved courses:
- ANTH. 72200 – Markets: Critical Hist. Apprch
- GC: R, 2:00-4:00, Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Blim [23404]
- ANTH. 82500 – Urban Futures: Ethnog/History
- GC: F, 11:45- 1:45, Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Profs. Low/Susser
- ART. 76040 – Software/Globlztn/Politcl Action
- GC: T: 2:00- 4:00 82000 – Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Profs. Manovich/Buck-Morss [23226]
- ART. 79400 – Aesthetics of Film
- GC: W, 4:15 8:15 2:00- p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Miller, [23229]
- This section open to Art History students only. Cross listed with FSCP 81000, THEA 71400 & FSCP & MALS 77100.
- ART 89600- Sonic Cinema GC: R, 2:00 – 5:00 pm Rm:
- TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Herzog
- ENGL. 79020 – Writing with the Body
- GC: T, :15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 2/4 credits, Prof. Perl, [23079]
- MALS. 71000 – Forms of Life Writing
- GC: T, 2:00-4:00 p.m. Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Koestenbaum
- MALS 70100 – Narratives NYC: Lit/Vis Arts
- GC: Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Singer, [23337]
- MALS 75500 – Digital Humanities: Meth/Prac
- GC: Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Profs. Brier/Gold [23349]
- MKT. 88800 Values/Ethics/Consumption Behaviour
- Bar: R, 2:00-4:00 p.m. Rm: TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Sen [23139]
- SOC. 80700 – Georg Lukacs/Frankfurt School
- GC: R, 4:15 – 6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Aronowitz, [23363]
- SOC. 81200 – Urban Ethnography
- GC: R, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Profs. Duncier/Kasinitz, [23367]
- SOC. 85000 – Yth Mrgnlztn/Subcltr Resistance
- GC: T, 6;30-8:30 p.m. Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Brotherton, [23376]
- SOC: 86800 – Consumer Society & Culture
- GC: R, 2:00-4:00 p.m., Rm TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Zukin, [23372]
- ART: 85050- The Baroque
- GC: T, 2:00-4:00 p.m., Rm 3421, 3 credits, Prof. Wunder [23235]
- This course explores the integrated interdisciplinary arts of the Baroque in seventeenth-century Europe. Major topics include theatricality, naturalism, festivals and ephemera, fashion, ritual, material culture and conspicuous consumption. Some class sessions will meet at museums and libraries (including the Frick, Met, Hispanic Society, and New York Public Library), where we will examine painting, sculpture, textiles, furnishings, and printed illustrated books. Readings will include an overview of classic art historiography on the Baroque in Europe as well as recent writings that bring new perspectives to bear from other fields (especially literature) and outside of Europe. No prior experience in early modern or art history is required or expected; students from other fields and disciplines are warmly welcomed to contribute to the class.
Auditors may be accepted if there is room in the class after registration. Please contact the instructor with any queries: ajwunder@gmail.com.
There is no required preliminary reading, but students are encouraged to read a general survey of seventeenth-century European history for context and background.
