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Looking sharp: fashion studies
chapter
posted on 2014-07-03, 10:42 authored by Malcolm BarnardFashion and clothing construct, reproduce and challenge all kinds of identity and they
do so visually and immediately. The meanings of the visual here, the meanings of what
people are wearing, are quickly learned and readily understood by all members of all cultures:
learning and understanding those meanings may even be said to be the conditions
for membership of those cultures. So, for example within seconds of seeing or meeting
someone we make a series of judgements concerning identity and culture, about who
they are and whether we will have anything in common with them, on the basis of what
they are wearing. Rarely, if ever, do we wonder what people mean by the things they
wear or dismiss garments as meaningless: meaning and identity are constructed, negotiated
and understood constantly in visual fashion. The centrality of fashion and clothing
to the concerns of this collection (the concern with visuality, meaning, identity, society
and culture), should nor need emphasizing. Social and cultural identity and social
and cultural status, including those identities and statuses that are to do with gender,
class, sexuality and ethnicity, are constructed, negotiated and challenged visually, in
and through what we wear. Similarly, our sense of self, and our understandings of our
own bodies, are also produced and tested visually by the things with which we adorn,
decorate, display, hide and protect our bodies-fashion and clothing. In raising concerns
such as these, fashion is at once an extremely ancient, a completely modern and
a thoroughly postmodern phenomenon. What people wear has always constructed and
indicated social and cultural status and what people wear is now part of a postmodern
and globalizing economy in which the relation of identity to consumption is readily or
functionally understood by almost everyone, even if nor everyone is ready to critically
analyse and explain that relation. This chapter will include everyday clothing, or dress, as well as fashion in its account
of fashion studies.
History
School
- The Arts, English and Drama
Department
- Arts
Published in
The Handbook of Visual Culture The Handbook of Visual CulturePages
405 - 425 (608)Citation
BARNARD, M., 2012. Looking sharp: fashion studies. In: Heywood, I. and Sandywell, B. (eds.) The Handbook of Visual Culture. London: Berg, pp. 405 - 425.Publisher
© BergVersion
- VoR (Version of Record)
Publication date
2012Notes
Closed access. This is a chapter from the book, The Handbook of Visual Culture.ISBN
184788573X;9781847885739Language
- en