T-P-14 (textile design) Cultural studies of fashion

The course addresses fashion from the perspective of cultural analysis. Fashion is in this context understood as a unique signifying system, yet not autonomous. Namely, there are several social relations that are inscribed in it, from economic, gender and sexual to ecological and political. Fashion, on the other hand, transforms these relations into a seemingly natural visual spectacle.
In order to understand all this, students are firstly acquainted with the most important systems of theoretical explanations. These include Marxism, post-Marxism and poststructuralism as well as the school of so-called British cultural studies, which has combined all these into a convincing analytical tool for understanding of popular culture. In what follows, the principles of these theoretical systems are used to analyse various concrete aspects of fashion, including topics as: fashion and modernity, fashion and relations of power in society, fashion and construction of gender and sexual identities, fashion as spectacle, fashion as an expression of contemporary split between attraction of play with appearance and social demand for authenticity.