Fall 2010 – Courses Offered

MALS. 70200 – The Fabric of Culture: New York Fashion
GC: T, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Profs. Paulicelli/Glick [12294]
Cross listed with IDS 82300

The seminar will examine fashion as an industry, an economic force, and a mechanism that creates and performs identities and fosters the interplay between gender, the body, and sexuality. In particular, the focus of the seminar will be on New York and on American fashion from the Gilded Age till the present. Particular attention will be given to periods of great transformation when fashion plays an important role in shaping the cultures of cities, has an impact on lifestyles and gender perception in the workplace and other social and private spaces. The course will also pay attention to the various changes that had an impact on fashion in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The course will cover the span from the sweatshop 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 with the New York Fashion week and New York as a global fashion capital. Special attention will be given to spaces of consumption and cultural mediation, department stores, magazines and the popular press, photography, film, art and design. New York fashion will be analyzed in both global and comparative perspectives. Topics will include immigration, ethnic identities, design, art and creativity, global versus local etc.
Readings will include authors such as Veblen, Simmel, Harvey, Benjamin, Hollander, Arnold, Kirkham, Zukin, Ewen, Steele, Currid, Breward. In addition we will study literary and cinematic texts.
For further information please contact the instructors at: epaulicelli@gc.cuny.edu or jglick@gc.cuny.edu