This site requires Javascript to be turned on. Please enable Javascript and reload the page.

Scholarly Fashion

Gosha Rubchinsky

This page has annotations:

Contents of this annotation:

This page is referenced by:

Weekly Readings

Week 1. Fashion as Archive and Repertoire
May, 26: Introduction. Young, Agnes Brooks "Fashion has Its Laws" pp. 46-57 Wilson, Elizabeth "Why do People Wear Clothes?"
May 27: Taylor, Diana. The Archive and the Repertoire p. 16-33.
Jenss, Heike. Fashioning Memory. “Introduction: Fashion and Cultural Memory.” pp. 1–14

Set up an account in Scalar
May 29, 5 pm: Introductory Blogpost Due
Week 2. From Imperial Nostalgia to Fashioning the Nation
June 1: Presley, Ann Beth “Fifty Years of Change: Societal Attitudes and Women's Fashions, 1900-1950,” The Historian Vol. 60, No. 2 1998, pp. 307-324
Wilson, Elizabeth. “Fashion & Memory: Unravelling twentieth-century fashion's relationship with memory and perpetual pursuit of the new.” Web.

June 2: See Chanel and Modernism on Google's "We Wear Culture" Project
Garelick Mademoiselle Coco Chanel and the Pulse of History, Chapter 4 “Grand Duke Dmitri”, p.110-134

June 3: Garelick, Chapter 10 “Chanel, fascism, and the Interwar Years” pp. 259-296
Veillon, Dominique. Fashion under the Occupation Preface, vii-ix, "Vichy, Fashion, and Women" p.125-139
June 5, 5pm Blogpost 2 Due: Fashion and Nation (500-700 words)

Week 3. Fashioning Gender and the Nostalgic New Look
June 8: Butler, Judith. “Lacan, Riviere, and the Strategies of Masquerade,” pp.43-48 (until the end of the first passage)
Wilson, Elizabeth. Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity Chapter 6, "Gender and Identity," pp. 117-133

June 9: Beauvoir, The Second Sex, "Social Life" pp. 649-660 (until the end of the first passage)
Steele, Valerie “The Corset: Fashion and Eroticism.” Fashion Theory 3.4, 1999. pp. 449-473 (make sure you are logged in through NYU library to access)
June 10: Rabine, Leslie “A Woman’s Two Bodies: Fashion Magazines, Consumerism, and Feminism,” pp. 59-75
Wright, Lee "Objectifying Gender: The Stiletto Heel" pp. 197-207 in Fashion Theory: A Reader
June 12, 5pm Blogpost 3 Due: Fashion and Gender

Week 4. The Second-Hand 60s and the Stakes of the Retro Aesthetics
June 15: Jenss, Fashioning Memory, “Icons of Modernity: Sixties Fashion and Youth Culture”, p.24-37,
Goodlad, Lauren M. E., Rushing, Robert, Kaganovsky, Lilya, Mad Men, Mad World: Sex, Politics, Style, and the 1960s, Introduction, pp. 1-17
Madmen, Season 1 Episode 1 “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes”
June 16: Silverman, Kaja. “Fragments of a Fashionable Discourse”, 52-139 (log in through NYU)
Madmen, Season 2, Episode 6 "Maidenform", Season 4, Episode 4, “The Rejected”
June 17: Rosenheck, “Swing Skirts and Swinging Singles,” Mad Men, Mad World, pp.161-180
“Vintage Style and Mediated Memories: Sixties DIY,” pp.113-138
Season 5, Episode 1-2 “A Little Kiss”
The Hipsters (Stiliagi, 2008), by Vareliy Todorovsky (fragments in class)
June 19, 5pm Blogpost 4 Due: Fashion Industry and Film

Week 5. Local Memory and Global Fashion
June 22: Martin, 'Our Kimono Mind: Reflections on 'Japanese Design: A Survey Since 1950' Journal of Design History Vol. 8, No. 3 (1995), pp. 215-223
See Comme des Garçons SS84: Japanese Explosion on Google's "We wear Culture"
Read about Demna Gvasalia ‘I don’t think elegance is relevant’: Vetements’ Demna Gvasalia, the world’s hottest designer' The Guardian, Feb 6, 2018
and Gosha Rubchinsky 'The man who made Russian fashion cool' The Guardian Oct 12, 2016
June 23: Rovine, “Nubia in Paris: African Style in French Fashion” pp. 71-105 (log in through NYU)
“Reinventing Local Forms: African Fashion Indigenous Style” pp. 107-121 (not the whole chapter)
June 24: Boris, Eileen “Fashion Works,” Feminist Studies Vol. 43, No. 1 (2017), pp. 169-192 (log in to Jstor through NYU)
Puwar, Nirmal “Multicultural Fashion: Stirrings of Another Sense of Aesthetics and Memory,” pp. 63-87.
June 26, 5pm Blogpost 5 Due: Local/Global in Fashion

Week 6. Retro and Vintage in the Age of Instagram
June 29: Perthuis, de Karen, Findlay, Rosie “How Fashion Travels: The Fashionable Ideal in the Age of Instagram,” Fashion Theory, Vol.23. 2019, pp.219-242.
Jenss, Fashioning Memory, “Investing (in) Time: Collecting and Consuming the Past” (ONLY the section "Accelerating consumption of the past: eBay expertise and memory making")

June 30: Evans, Caroline “Yesterday’s Emblems and Tomorrow’s Commodities: The Return of the Repressed in Fashion Imagery Today,” pp. 93-113 , “Untimely Fashion” pp.139-146 (log in through NYU)

July 1: Conclusions and Final Projects presentations
July 3: Final Paper (8-10 pages) / Scalar piece due (2,500-3,000 words)