Fashion Studies Now—If It Did Not Exist We Would Surely Have to Invent It

In 2010, at Parsons School of Design, we began offering an MA in Fashion Studies, with an interdisciplinary focus, to enable “a critical and historical understanding of fashion” and its “complex intersections with identities and cultures.” To facilitate this, we highlighted “the material and visual dimensions of fashion as dress, image, and bodily practice,” within the context of fashion viewed as a major cultural industry that locates the individual within society and the world. Our approach positioned the program/and the field, within and beyond the bounds of academia, relative to design studies, which we were also developing, and to design practice and everyday life. It continues to be reflected in how we have developed the program content, to introduce specialisms in fashion curating, fashion writing, and gender studies, and its geography - to include it being offered at Parsons Paris. This is important - for over the same period in the public, professional and cultural domains, as well as in the academy, there has been a veritable fashion explosion. Fashion now impacts the lives, work and leisure of increasing numbers of people around the globe, as wearers, workers, viewers, commentators or aficionados. As a result, we require an interdisciplinary field – Fashion Studies, to address it. In this presentation, I will argue that we need Fashion Studies now more than ever, to respond intelligently and moreover critically to fashion’s omnipresence, not just as an abstraction in the academy, but as an actuality in our lives.