Fashion, identity, and power
The McKelvy Scholars will host a discussion on fashion led by Stefano Mancini ’22 on Sunday at 6 p.m. Email the group for the Zoom link. Stefano provides this background:
Fashion is a useful category of analysis because of its close relationship with identity, including gender and race; how fashion operates both on collective and individual scales to allow us to create our own identities and demonstrate our belonging to larger identity groups; and because fashion has both symbolic significance and environmental/material significance in how it is produced and consumed. Fashion can both be a reflection and a mask, an opportunity to conform and to subvert.
I hope that this discussion serves as a space of comfortable reflection and sharing about what fashion means to us, and along the way, I expect that we’ll touch on topics such as the ethics of consumption, how we make communities, and what makes us unique as individuals. I hope to create a space where people feel comfortable to reflect and speak on their own fashion ideals as well as interrogate where fashion comes from and why it matters.
Please spend some time exploring this exhibit.
And pondering cottagecore:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/10/style/cottagecore.html
https://grist.org/climate/why-is-cottagecore-so-white/
And getting some background on the fashion industry:
https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2020/2/3/21080364/fast-fashion-h-and-m-zara
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/06/fast-fashion-labor-prada-gucci-abuse-designer
Questions
- What do you wear? Why do you wear it?
- Is fashion a vehicle of self-expression? What is the relationship between consumption and self-expression?
- Where do fashion trends come from?
- How do subcultures develop? What do they signify? Are there any examples, and what can they tell us about the social structure at large?
- What kinds of stories do subcultures tell – about ourselves, about society, about the past?