Fashion: The Political and Cultural Representations Behind Styles

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

Research Program 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?

We contend that fashion is both “material” and “mysterious.” Specific fashions can reflect culture, gender, and attitude or be used as manifestos. 

This program will examine how fashion functions as communication, meaning-making, and representation spaces 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. Thus, we pay close attention to how fashion participates in constructing and deconstructing social borders. We then examine the politics of fashion, identity, self-presentation, and power.

Moreover, this program explores how power is forged through 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 program completion.

Project Topics

• Understand fashion as an ideological phenomenon wherein forms of cultural and social capital 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 that 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 to understand “how it works” and “how it persuades and coerces”

Program Details

• Cohort size: 3 to 5 students

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

• Target students: 9 to 12th graders interested in popular culture, fashion, politics, media studies, ethnic studies, and/or social sciences.