FASHION SYSTEMS: PARIS AND BEYOND in Summer 2021 (CM2091-3WK1)

There is more than one fashion system, more than one global capital of fashion. This course aims to decentralise and de-hierarchise existing notions of fashion by exploring a number of fashion systems – past and present. While we take our location, Paris, as a starting point for our experiential exploration of the professional field of fashion, we will move beyond the myth. Paris has been the self-proclaimed world fashion capital for more than three-hundred years. This city has influenced the very notion of fashion itself, but also global aesthetic codes, and the way many of us consume and wear garments. Paris and its fashion myth have been instrumental in the development of a highly complex globalised fashion system, which has subsumed and suppressed many other fashion systems.
We will consider the correlations between these systems without the processes of fashion cannot be understood. How are fashionable commodities made, mediated, consumed – and what happens to them once they have gone out of fashion? How are Paris as a fashion city and its key figure La Parisienne discursively constructed? How have systems of textiles and fashion changed in recent years – both in Paris and globally? What impact has its altered dimensions had on the bodies that work within the industry and those wearing and living with its products? These questions will be analysed in lectures, seminars, research projects, visits, and by making extensive use of film in addition to other visual media and textual sources.