BA1 CLASS READING - INTRODUCTION TO THEORY - APPROACHES TO STUDYING FASHION - this reading is extracts (...) from the set text.

KEY APPROACHES TO STUDYING FASHION FROM THE INTRODUCTION TO FASHION - THE KEY CONCEPTS. JENNIFER CRAIK. 2009.

Although many students of fashion want to learn about it simply because they like dressing up or shopping for clothes, this doesn't happen in a vacuum. We need to understand why fashion fascinates us and acquire tools that help us make sense of fashion as a cultural phenomenon. This means that we have to understand how different writers have analysed fashion from particular perspectives, that is developed theories of fashion. You may not be interested in theory, but if you ignore it, your understanding of fashion will be limited and one dimensional because it will lack a critical perspective, which make your attitude to fashion shallow. This is not to say that what you like and don't like is not valid, but it does mean that these are just opinions that do not take account of the myriad of factors that shape why fashion is how it is and why you like certain fashions and not others. These factors include the history of clothes, the structure and economics of the industry, artistic influences on taste, the social organisation of a culture (which, for  example, determines status and cultures of gender), and factors that shape cultural continuity and change. Fashion theorists try to develop a model that takes account of these various factors.

Consequently, how we make sense of fashion depends on which intellectual or disciplinary approach we adopt to study fashion. ...

Here, I will briefly introduce several different perspectives that have shaped contemporary fashion theory. ...

Dress History: The What and the When

Traditionally, understanding fashion was the province of dress curators and historians, who were interested in describing and categorising the particular features of apparel and changing forms of dress. This instrumental approach to the study of fashion was called 'dress history'. These analysts interpreted dress as the genre of objects that reflected aspects of design, construction, fabric and aesthetics. This systematic collection and analysis of apparel created historical records of changing modes of dress and extensive museum collections of examples of dress in the past, thus contributing to the classification of different kinds of clothing and successive dress styles. ...

What About the How and the Why?

Valuable though these histories and exhibitions have been, the dating and classificatory approach to explaining the significance of dress did not address issues such as the following:

What made certain styles fashionable at one time?
How and why did fashions change over time?
How and why have cycles of fashion sped up with cycles of consumer behaviour (market economies ...)?
How have changing gender codes and norms of sexual behaviour influenced fashion systems?
What have been the the effects of transforming political regimes on the fashions of civil society? ...

Anthropologists, Ethnologists, and Social Scientists

While dress historians were formally associated with the study of fashion, arguably richer veins were to be found in the work of anthropologists, ethnologists, and the precursors of social scientists ... These theorists were interested in developing so-called grand theories of society and culture as a whole and used the example of dress and fashion as an instance of their general principles.

In particular, such theorists wanted to explain why humans were distinctive and how they differed from animals. Factors like language, collective modes of living, forms of social exchange, and the use of symbolic systems were part of the answer. Among the most important symbolic forms were modes of dress - that is, the fact that humans have always adorned the body with skins, fabrics, ornaments, pigments, and so on. Clothing, therefore, was seen as a key clue to understanding humanity. ...

Social Psychologists and Sociologists

As the twentieth century progressed, fashion attracted other disciplinary perspectives that focused on the fashion phenomenon as  specific social system itself rather than just seeing it as an example of general social principles. These accounts emanated from:


Social Psychologists, who were interested in accounting for individual motivations and needs that underpinned dress behaviour and fashion trends
Sociologists, who were more interested in understanding the 'lemming-like' (unthinking, indiscriminate) way in which groups of people adopt dress codes, especially in a consumer culture, where one acquires social value by buying the attributes one desires


Questions about how clothes denote social status (hierarchies, class position and differentiation, age, gender, and ethnicity) were central to such approaches. ...


Interdisciplinary Approaches


From the 1960s, critiques of cultural theory began to question these compartmentalised and one-dimensional approaches to understanding social and cultural phenomena, and approaches that were mor inclusive and less prescriptive were developed, These approaches have been called variously structuralist, semiotic, postmodern, and poststructuralist. ...


... recent and contemporary approaches to fashion theory are distinctive in two ways. First, they tend to draw on more than one disciplinary focus, that is, they are inter- or multidisciplinary. Second, they are interested in explaining the minutiae or details of fashion behaviour as a cultural code for creating meaning for particular individuals or groups rather than just seeing fashion as exemplifying general principles. (Craik, 2009, pp.5-14).

REFERENCE

Craik, J. (2009) Fashion - the key concepts. Oxford: Berg.