BA1 CLASS READINGS - INTRODUCTION TO THEORY - INTERDISCIPLINARY FASHION THEORY - this reading is extracts (...) from the set text. 

CHAPTER 3 - FASHION CYCLES, SYMBOLS AND FLOWS, FROM FASHION - THE KEY CONCEPTS. JENNIFER CRAIK. 2009.

... the study of fashion and dress has been approached from a number of disciplinary frameworks (including anthropology, sociology, psychology, sexology, art history, and economics). Many of the earlier approaches used a general theory perspective. ... semiotics and structuralism offer a more specific understanding of the meanings of particular fashions and modes of wearing fashion.


The impact of these approaches has been enormous and shaped late twentieth-century trends in cultural theory. Called postmodernism, contemporary theory has been more concerned with specific phenomena and its deconstruction in order to understand how cultural practices develop, circulate, and are maintained. This has resulted in a trend of interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary approaches that draw on a number of aspects of a range of theories. Such developments have informed recent theorizations of the fashion phenomenon, which can be grouped as follows:


Historical Approaches


Dress-and-textile history approaches to the study of dress and decoration focus on the formal properties and curatorial provenance of apparel as objects that typify a period or fashion era ...


A social history approach locates clothing in its social context of economic status, gender, ethnic, symbolic, and structural factors ...


Consumer Culture Approaches 


... Marketing and management studies, advertising, and merchandizing studies consider fashion as an industry and commercial business.



Industrial relations and political science focus on employment conditions of workers in the fashion industry and effects of outsourcing and subcontracting on the industry. 


Cultural Forces 


... Diasporic and ethnic studies of fashion explore fashions that become a communicative strategy in order to situate diasporic communities and identities in the global village ...


Communicative Relationships


... Subfields of cultural and media studies include textual analysis, social marginalization, and subcultural analysis ...


Gender-Related and -Dependent Practices


Feminist approaches privilege the specific gendered implications of the manipulation of fashion systems to construct desired images of femininity ...


Psychoanalytical approaches explain fashion behaviour in terms of unconscious sexual desires and erotic tendencies related to the formation of the ego and the id ...


Masculinity and queer studies explore the particularities of man's relationship with fashion and the construction of masculinity ... (Craik, 2009, pp.115-117).

REFERENCE

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