Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
Patrizia Calefato
The term fashion theory refers to an interdisciplinary field that sees fashion as a meaning system within which cultural and aesthetic portrayals of the clothed body are produced.
The use of the term fashion theory points to a transverse theoretical approach which, in advance of any professional know-how, constructs favourable conditions and theoretical filters by selecting from among the human and social sciences (including literature, philosophy and art) the fashion system understood as a special dimension of material culture, the history of the body, the theory of sensibility.
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Fashion Theory is also the title of an international quarterly edited by Valerie Steele and published by Berg (Oxford) since 1997
Thorstein Veblens The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) includes spending on clothing as part of conspicuous consumption by the upper middle classes
Sombart (1913) takes the view that spending (especially by women) on luxuries, of which clothing and cocotteries are a significant part, has been a key feature of capitalism ever since its original accumulation phase.
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Barthes lesson, which thus goes beyond actual semiology, is that fashion only exists through the apparatus, technologies and communication systems that construct its meaning. The post-modern context makes clear that a whole series of social discourses from film to music, the new media and advertising, are the places where fashion exists as a syncretic, intertextual system, as a reticular reference between the signs of the clothed body and as a constant construction and deconstruction of the subjects that negotiate, interpret or receive its meaning.
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Windowlicker, 1999
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Narrativity
Every fashion effectively contains within it a narrative, or story, that explains its uses and determines its rhythms
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Spatiality
The street, the catwalk, the whole world become spaces, territories in which objects come to life and bodies interact.
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Myth
Fashions take constructions of meaning and figures of imagination which are reproduced in the social sphere and make them emblematically natural and eternal, even if transient.
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Sensoriness
Human senses, in their complexity and reciprocity, are at work in the reproduction and communication of fashions There are stereotypes of feeling, but there are also forms of excessive sensoriness which can use the intrinsic fetishism of fashion, the living power of objects and garments, to invert and humanise their meaning.
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