Class Contemporary Fashion Culture or Costume Design

This curricular unit introduces students to fashion theory in the broad sense. Based on contemporary ways of thinking fashion, the theories studied go beyond identity and trends, considering the object of fashion also from other points of view, including technology and material culture. Students learn the importance of theory as a way to look at contemporary fashion issues and cases.

• Introduction to different theoretical perspectives on clothing. Each perspective is based on a text that students read in preparation for class discussion (reading list in bibliography).
• Clothing seen as:
1) objects of identity and communication
2) technological artifacts
3) objects of everyday use
4) goods and agents of economic activity
5) agents of environmental degradation

Methods include reading texts in preparation for class discussions, researching fashion cases that illustrate the point of view of theories, making presentations on the focus of the texts to be written by students, and making drafts of the final text to receive feedback in class.
The evaluation is based on the students' participation in the readings and class exercises in the first phase (30%), interim deliveries of the article (4 x 10%) and the article in its final version (30%).

Latour, B. (1992) 'Where are the missing masses? The sociology of a few mundane artifacts', in Bijker, W. E. and Law, J. (eds) Shaping Technology/Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, pp. 225-258.

Maldini, I., & Manz, R. L. (2018). From “things of imitation” to “devices of differentiation”: uncovering a paradoxical history of clothing (1950–2015). Fashion Theory, 22(1), 69-84.

Payne, A. (2019). Fashion futuring in the anthropocene: sustainable fashion as “taming” and “rewilding”. Fashion Theory, 23(1), 5-23.

Simmel, G. (1997). Fashion, adornment and style. Simmel on culture, 187-217. 
Sullivan, A. (2015). Fashion and Capitalism. In Thinking through fashion: A guide to key theorists, 28.

Woodward, S., Miller, D., & Kuechler, S. (2005). Looking good, feeling right: aesthetics of the self. In Clothing as material culture (pp. 21-40). Berg Publishers.