Full Description
For Spring Summer 2020, Gucci showed a collection questioning identity politics and capitalism. Rather than the usual explanation of the material, shapes or inspirations behind the collection, the press release handed out at the show quoted the philosopher Michel Foucault and questioned the very nature of fashion itself.
Gucci's press release reflects the popularization of critical theory in public discourse and fashion in particular. Philosophers, activists and academics are increasingly recruited to collaborate with luxury brands, and main-stream fashion brands have begun to adopt a discourse about politics and critical thinking using, in their communication, concepts such as "resistance", "gender fluidity", "national identity" or "cultural heritage" without accompanying these discourses with any form of political engagement or activism.
Based on this intellectualization of the fashion industry and the recent proliferation of critical theory in fashion education, this book stresses the importance of rethinking the relationship between fashion and theory. Drawing together eleven chapters and four conversations by and with philosophers, cultural theorists, historians, anthropologists, activists, performers and designers, the book investigates both the theorization of fashion and the ways in which fashion offers a useful landscape in understanding the current state of critical theory today.
Contents
Introduction: Fashion in theory - Marco Pecorari
I Historicizing and translating
1 Sensitive theory - Emanuele Coccia
2 Fashion-Théorie: A theory of practice by Alexis Lavigne - Marlène Van de Casteele
3 The making of Fashion Theory: A conversation with Valerie Steele and Peter McNeil
4 Theorizing contemporary fashion and historical time: Caroline Evans in conversation with Marco Pecorari
5 Anti-spectacular fashion: From Guy Debord's to Karl Lagerfeld's dialectics - Maxime Boidy
II Subjectivity and positionality
6 Notes on theorizing from the personal - Carol Tulloch
7 Theatre of the self: Self-fashioning and self-theorization in the case of Leonor Fini - Andrea Kollnitz
8 Men's wear / woman's work: The issue of positionality when researching and curating menswear - Marta Franceschini
9 Holding space, creating changes - Erica de Greef and Sarah Cheang
10 Unmaking Western epistemologies with Indigenous fashion - Sariah Park and Antoinette Alba
11 'Their bodies, my body': Posing the modern Singaporean female as a decolonial method - Angelene Wong
III Practices and making
12 What kind of activism is theorizing? - Otto Von Busch
13 Donna Haraway's threads: Textile metaphors for earthly survival - Morna Laing
14 Theory as a toolbox: Unmaking fashion and creative industries: Angela McRobbie and Giulia Mensitieri in conversation with Marco Pecorari
15 Fashion, capitalism and the difficulty of reparations - Serkan Delice
16 Teaching theory for fashion designers in arts and design universities: Caroline Stevenson and Saul Marcadent in conversation with Marco Pecorari
