Course Description

Is fashion political? Can political power be performed in a range of sartorial guises?

From Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Met Gala white gown with the message “tax the rich” emblazoned in red, to the black T-shirts and yellow ribbons of Hong Kong protesters, to the rise of MAGA as a kind of anti-fashion, it is clear fashion is an important aspect of political performance.

Fashion is politically meaningful and consequential, but it continues to be generally ignored in intellectual life, perhaps because it is usually associated with the frivolous and insignificant. Yet the line between high politics and frivolous fashion is drawn less clearly than expected.

Engaging in different disciplines – including visual and digital culture, economics, philosophy, history, anthropology, and media studies – the course will work with students to explore the relationships between fashion and global politics. What are you wearing today? How do your clothes express your identity? How, in your everyday life, do fashion and politics intersect?

This course, which draws on the cities of “high” and “low” fashion, aims to show the close connections of fashion and politics in a globalised world. Our discussion will move across boundaries to show how fashion circulates as a robust geopolitical, commercial, and personal element of global, national, and local cultures.

Course Learning Outcomes

On completing the course, students will be able to:

1. Describe the interplay between fashion, gender and politics, and how media portray these dynamics.
2. Analyse the political, economic, religious, social and cultural variables in the enactment of style.
3. Appraise the notion of fashion as a commodity, understanding the implications of consumerism. 
4. Analyse how a fashion object can enhance or obscure its political potency.
5. Interrogate the absence of sufficient scholarship on fashion as a political phenomenon.

Offer Semester and Day of Teaching

First semester (Wed)