The Social Skin: Fashion Through a Critical Lens (2024/2025: Semester 2 – Summer)

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Cursusdoel

After completing this course, students are able to:
  1. Reproduce and explain key theories, theorists, concepts and debates in fashion studies;
  2. Analyze the changing roles and meanings of fashion from the early modern period to the present, both in its material manifestations and conceptually;
  3. Identify the productive tensions between dress as a pan-human phenomenon, and temporal/ spatially specific ways of production, use and circulation of dress, adornments, cosmetics;
  4. Analyze and compare different case studies from various continents and time periods
  5. Apply rhetoric skills (presentation, communication, argumentation, directing a group discussion);
  6. Produce written work consistent with established standards of academic integrity and scholarship that does justice to fashion as an interdisciplinary field.
Description of assignment Assesses which course aims?
  1. Group presentation literature
  2. Term essay
  3. Reflection report discussions
  4. Take-home exam
 1, 5
1-4, 6
1, 6
1-4, 6

Vakinhoudelijk

This course aims to challenge popular perceptions of fashion as merely connected with vanity, superficiality, or folly. We will utilize fashion as a lens to explore topics as diverse as identity, gender and sexuality, religion, recycling, oppression and protest, subcultures, nationalism, and cultural appropriation.

The course is structured around three main pillars. Firstly, it introduces various theories, key debates, and concepts in fashion theory and history. This encompasses the work of scholars examining the relationship between fashion and the body, as well as empirical approaches that investigate how clothing is imbued with meaning, embedded in everyday life and practice, and possesses agency.

Secondly, the course explores fashion from a global perspective. While fashion discourses, styles, and inspirations traverse all boundaries—national, ethnic, or class—fashion often retains a distinctively local flavor. Simultaneously, as a concept and a system of production, distribution, and consumption, fashion has become truly globalized.

Thirdly, the course adopts a decolonial lens to examine fashion. Fashion (practices) will be analyzed in relation to the broader historical and political economy within which clothes are made, marketed, and consumed. We will critique the detrimental impact of (post)colonialism, inequality and market economies on local fashioning systems, labor conditions, and ecologies worldwide.


Format

Interactive class lectures will be alternated with tutorials, student presentations, film viewings, and one excursion.

Werkvormen

UCU INT 2 course

Toetsing

Term essay

Verplicht | Weging 25% | ECTS 1,88

Reflections discussion

Verplicht | Weging 25% | ECTS 1,88

Presentation

Verplicht | Weging 20% | ECTS 1,5

Take -home exam

Verplicht | Weging 30% | ECTS 2,25

Ingangseisen en voorkennis

Voertalen

  • Engels

Cursusmomenten

Gerelateerde studies

Tentamens

Er is geen tentamenrooster beschikbaar voor deze cursus

Verplicht materiaal

  • DIVERSE
    Entry ticket museum
  • BOEK
    Entwistle, Joanne (2023), The fashioned body. Fashion, dress and modern social theory. Cambridge: Polity Press (third edition)

Aanbevolen materiaal

Er is geen informatie over de aanbevolen literatuur bekend

Opmerkingen

Counts towards HUM and SSC major. Alternates with UCINTGAS11.

Coördinator

dr. R. Woets r.woets@uu.nl

Docenten

dr. R. Woets r.woets@uu.nl

Inschrijving

Let op: deze cursus is niet toegankelijk voor studenten van andere faculteiten, bijvakkers mogen zich dus niet inschrijven.

Naar OSIRIS-inschrijvingen
Permanente link naar de cursuspagina
Laat in de Cursus-Catalogus zien