Faculty Advisor: Professor of Global Liberal Studies, New York University in Paris

Research Practicum Introduction

Why do you dress the way you do? Do your clothes “speak?” What are they saying? Is it “trendy?” Do they really judge you by your shoes? Does fashion have meaning and, if so, where does it come from?

It is our contention that fashion is both “material” and “mysterious.” Certain fashion can reflect culture, gender, attitude, or even be used as a manifesto. 

This program will examine how fashion functions as spaces of communication, meaning-making, and representation where cultural politics are implicitly and explicitly negotiated. Through media theory, cultural studies, psychology, and sociology, we develop an interdisciplinary approach to how fashion has been valued through history, popular culture, and media institutions. We thus pay close attention to how fashion participates in the construction and deconstruction of social borders. Following from this, we examine the politics of fashion and identity, and self-presentation and power.  

Moreover, this program also explores how power is forged from within the relay of production, “taste-making,” consumption, performance, and the construction of “lifestyles.” Attention is also given to how fashion, dress, and clothing intersect with race, class, gender, sexuality, and religion.

Students will also learn general and subject-specific research and academic writing methods used in universities and scholarly publications. Students will focus on individual topics and generate their own work products upon completion of the program.

Project Topics

• Understand fashion as an ideological phenomenon wherein circulate forms of cultural and social capital that serve as the grounds for social inclusion and exclusion

• Key concepts and thinkers in the critical theory of fashion

• Recognize how fashion and fashion industries “dress up reality,” and thus function as ways of inverting real social relations

• Read fashion as a bearer of meaning which is contested and continually changing

• Develop comparative approaches to Fashion which place in relief the political and aesthetic antinomies of the Global

• Construct ethnographic approaches to fashion and power 

• Analyze “fashion cycles” and the historical development of trends of a given time

• Explore fashion media with a view to understanding “how it works” and “how it persuades and coerces”

Program Detail

• Cohort Size: 3-5 students

• Workload: Around 4-5 hours per week (including class time and homework time)

• Target Students: 9-12th grade students interested in popular culture, fashion, politics, media studies, ethnic studies and/or social sciences in general.