Assignment:
Write 2 pages about an item of clothing, a fashion trend now or in the historical past, an aspect of the fashion industry or media, an image, or an event that illustrates for you the relationship between fashion and any of the following: politics, power, class, and gender. You can draw this example from our readings and lectures. You can also choose an example of your own that you think relates to the issues we have been discussing. In either case, describe the example (feel free to post a picture), explain what it represents, and place it in dialogue with at least threeof our readings for the last two weeks. One of these three can be a reference to an image or slide shown in lecture.
Topics you might discuss from our readings include:
1) Fashion as social identity - Howdid fashion emerge from the styling of particular bodies in particular historical, social, economic and/or geographical contexts? Consider any of the following:
a) the city streets and arcades that are home to the 19th c. London and Paris dandy (Baudelaire, Benjamin, Sennett)
b) the court of Versailles, the queen's private pleasure chateau the Petit Trianon, the streets of revolutionary Paris, or any other site for Marie Antoinette's many fashion revolutions (Weber)
c) the Louvre as occupied by the Carters in Apsht (note that if you choose this example you must discuss it in relation to three of our readings for class)
d) the contemporary street-style associated with or appropriated by particular social groups (racial, ethnic, sexual)(Pham)
2) Fashion as a signifier, language, or code that has multiple and varying signifieds(Barthes, Baudrillard, Miller, Weber, Fury)
a) the multiple meanings of Marie Antoinette's chemise engaulle (the queen's white dress) or the revolutionary cockade
b) the multiple meanings of blue jeans (Dant)
c) The production of various significations of gender, race, ethnicity, class in how a clothing item is created or consumed or worn (Dant)
3) Fashion as commodity (Veblen, Marx, Dant) You could discuss how a particular item is either passively or actively consumed, its commodity circulation, what gives it the magical life Marx attributes to commodities, what it hides or buries (labor, etc.). What is the commodity selling?
4) Questions of appropriation: who can wear what? This might be considered in relation to early sumptuary laws, contemporary cultural appropriation debates in the arena of street style, the frenzy of imitation of Marie Antoinette and the danger that seemed to signal to French society, etc. (Pham, Sennett, Weber, Hooks)
5) The relationship between fashion and revolution. How did a particular historical moment understand and represent the center of power through fashion and the unseating of that power?
6) How fashion makes identity. Almost everything we have looked at or read can be understood in terms of how fashion makes a particular kind of identity, variously aristocratic, bourgeois (middle-class), modern, racial, ethnic, gendered, sexual. Choose one or two fashion expressions and discuss how they help us understand the nature of identity. Seen through this particular fashion expression, what does identity seem to be? Fixed or fluid, individual or social, conformist norm or free expression, innate or constructed, true or false? Keep in mind that binaries are often traps and that fashion as a sign system is all about occupying an endlessly mobile process of making meaning. You could consult Baudrillard, Barthes, Sennett.
The criteria for this assignment are as follows:
• Length: This assignment is 2 pages (please double space, use 12-pt Times New Roman, and keep standard 1-1.25-inch margins). Please keep your work roughly within this word-count range: turning in an assignment that is significantly shorter OR longer will impact your grade.
• Specificity: Do not only write in general or vague terms about the things you notice: you MUST include one or more quotations from the readings you choose. These quotations should be the ones that you think best exemplify the aspects of fashion you are discussing and should provide you with a concrete basis for discussing the significance of the aspects.
• Analysis: Explain the significance of your examples (the clothing item and the readings) by paying attention to these questions. Are there specific words or phrases in the quotations you've chosen that seem especially meaningful and, if so, what is their significance? What do the specific things you've identified illuminate about your clothing item? And what do both the readings and the clothing item illuminate about what fashion is, how it works, what it does, how it shapes us/selfhood/society?
• Logic and Coherence: While there are no right and wrong answers for this assignment, it is your job to make sure the three things you choose to write about make logical sense in the context of this assignment and that you explain them in a way that justifies their inclusion. Although you are not being asked to structure this assignment as an essay with a single over-arching thesis statement, your response paper should be structured coherently with a clear introductory sentence or two, topic sentences for each paragraph that connect sensibly to one another, and analysis/explanation that relates clearly to the introductory and topic sentences.
• Grammar and Clarity: This is a writing assignment in a literature class and the clarity of your prose matters. Please proofread carefully to avoid typos and grammar errors: sentence fragments, run-on sentences, nouns and verbs that don't agree, tangled sentence structure, and other grammar mistakes will interfere with your ability to communicate your ideas clearly and will result in a lower grade.
Readings:
1. Orientalism
By Edward W. Said
2. Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance
By Bell Hooks
3. Fetishism
By Sigmund Freud
4. Great Aspirations-Hip hop, and fashion dress excess and success
By Emil Wilbekin