Thinking Through Fashion: A Guide to Key Theorists

by Agnès Rocamora (Editor), Anneke Smelik (Editor)

Learning how to think through fashion is both exciting and challenging, being dependent on one s ability to critically engage with an array of theories and concepts. This is the first book designed to accompany readers through the process of thinking through fashion. It aims to help them grasp both the relevance of social and cultural theory to fashion, dress, and material culture and, conversely, the relevance of those fields to social and cultural theory. It does so by offering a guide through the work of selected major thinkers, introducing their concepts and ideas. Each chapter is written by an expert contributor and is devoted to a key thinker, capturing the significance of their thought to the understanding of the field of fashion, while also assessing the importance of this field for a critical engagement with these thinkers ideas. This is a guide and reference for students and scholars in the fields of fashion, dress and material culture, the creative industries, sociology, cultural history, design and cultural studies."

Genres: Fashion, Nonfiction, Theory, Art, Sociology, Anthologies

320 pages, Paperback

First published September 30, 2015

Reviews

[Anna · Rating 4 out of 5]

After a few days on holiday from work, I felt like reading some theory. Thinking Through Fashion: A Guide to Key Theorists consists of seventeen short chapters, each summarising the contribution of a specific theorist to the study of fashion. Some (Marx, Freud) were very familiar, while three were new to me (Georg Simmel, Erving Goffman, & Nicklas Luhmann). Despite being written in academic style, I found all the chapters pleasantly clear and readable as this is intended as an introductory text for students. It probably also helped that in most cases the theories were being applied to an area of study that the original theorist hardly commented on, if at all. The first thing I should mention is that the book does not use a consistent definition of fashion to distinguish it from wearing clothes. Some chapters consider fashion to have begun with mass production of clothes in the nineteenth century, while others refer to it in the Renaissance, etc. This isn't really a problem, although it creates occasional confusion.

While I found all the chapters interesting, my two favourites focused on Walter Benjamin and Pierre Bourdieu. The former reignited my desire to read The Arcades Project by discussing Benjamin's commentary on, 'the way in which fashion invests in historical references while simultaneously undermining them'. The Bourdieu chapter is fun as it applies his field theory to fashion blogging. (Note that this book was published in 2015; I miss fashion bloggers.) The Barthes chapter is useful for summarising elements of his book The Fashion System, while also containing the highest density of jargon, e.g. 'Taking up this hermeneutic challenge, we can see how the painting invites a series of polysemous responses or interpretations concerning its subject matter and style of representation and how these subtend the form and content of the YSL ad as well.'

I enjoyed being introduced to new theorists of relevance to fashion and finding familiar theories applied in new ways. There's a nice little critique of Baudrillard in chapter 13:

From a theoretical viewpoint, looser signifier-signified relationships may simply mean a fragmentation of society into smaller units of relevant frames of reference, with less rigid boundaries, rules, and membership requirements. It may also imply shorter and faster cycles of change of what a relevant reference group regards as the appropriate code, but does not necessarily indicate the abolition of a code. From an empirical viewpoint there is ample evidence, experimental and anecdotal, to suggest that signification in fashion is far more resilient than some post-modern thinkers would have us believe.

My experience of the chapter on Bruno Latour was coloured by a savage and utterly convincing critique of his actor-network theory in relation to the environment, The Progress of This Storm: Nature and Society in a Warming World by Andreas Malm. This theory is applied a bit more cautiously in the realm of fashion, rather than to justify absurdities about coal being an 'actant' (active participant) in climate change. Nonetheless, theorists should be wary of claiming that nature and culture are the same in this post-modern age. Doing so obscures understanding.

The chapters on Deleuze and Derrida were informative, while putting me off reading the theorists' own works. Judith Butler's chapter was good, but barely scratched the surface of gender and fashion. It's also notable that all sixteen other chapters covered male theorists and barely mentioned gender at all, despite its obvious importance to fashion. I suppose most of the big-name theorists of the 19th and 29th centuries were European white guys and this is an introduction to them specifically. Anyhow, I enjoyed Thinking Through Fashion: A Guide to Key Theorists and it whetted my appetite for more fashion theorising.

[Majken Emilie · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a very good, very helpful book!

This book is an overview of the key theorists whos work relates to fashion.

There is 17 theorists and each chapter is about 20 pages long. The chapters are short and concise, and because of that perfect for anyone who wants to read more fashion theory but doesn't know where to start. This is perfect if you study fashion and are writing/going to write an essay or dissertation and you're not sure where to start. This is obviously a guide to the different theorists and not texts by the actual theorist themselves. Each chapter is written by different people who I assume are specialized in the subject/theorist

The theorists included are:
- Karl Marx - Fashion and Capitalism
- Signmund Freud - More then a Fetish: Fahion and Psychoanalysis
- Georg Simmel - The "Philosophical Monet"
- Walter Benjamin - Fashion, Modernity and the City Street
- Mikhail Bakhtin - Fashioning the Grotesque Body
- Maurice Merleau-Ponty - The Corporeal Experience of Fashion
- Roland Barthes - Semiology and the Rhetorical Codes of Fashion
- Erving Goffman - Social Science as Art of Cultural Observation
- Gilles Deleuze - Bodies-Without-Organs in the folds of fashion
- Michel Foucault - Fashioning the Body Politic
- Niklas Luhmann - Fashion between the Fashionable and Old-fashioned
- Jean Baudrillard - Post-modern Fashion and the End of Meaning
- Pierre Boudrieu - The Field of Fashion
- Jacques Derrida - Fashion under Erasure
- Bruno Latour - Actor-Network-Theory and Fashion
- Judith Butler - Fashion and Performativity

[Paul Ataua · Rating 4 out of 5]

‘Thinking Through Fashion’ sets itself up as an introduction to the key theorists in Fashion, and it is really just that. Each part introduces some sociologist or philosopher and gives a fairly shallow sketch of what they have to say and how that relates to fashion. Given that the book covers 17 theorists in just over 300 pages, it means that, unless a brief glimpse is all you are looking for, you only get a simple and not very satisfying introduction . On the positive side, however, there is enough in each chapter to let you know whether you want to pursue a more in-depth study of that theorist, and in that lies the reason for the four stars.

[Kathleen · Rating 4 out of 5]

"As fashion spreads, it gradually goes to its doom. [...] Fashion always occupies the dividing-line between the past and the future, and consequently conveys a stronger feeling of the present, at least while it is at its height, than most other phenomena." ~ George Simmel

[Kelly Gamache · Rating 3 out of 5]

I love the content but some of the essays are written in ways that are harder to read than they could be. Clarity could be improved.

[Morolake · Rating 4 out of 5]

Highly recommended for fashion academics exploring how general theory intesect with the world of dress, clothing, bodies and fashion.

Also, a bit technical read. Some of the chapters were a bit clunky and hard to digest. But overall, great!

[Angela · Rating 4 out of 5]

Heterogeneous.