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Slide 01
Fashion
- The Art of Dress
- Fashion is simultaneously the most intimate and the most public of art forms — worn on the body, read by strangers, and shaped by forces ranging from royal decree to street protest, from industrial capitalism to individual genius.
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Slide 02
Fashion Versus Clothing
- Definition
- Clothing is the practical need; fashion is the cultural system that transforms it into meaning. All fashion involves clothing; not all clothing involves fashion. The distinction lies in intention, context, and the temporal dimension that gives fashion its defining characteristic: it is by definition temporary.
- "Fashion is not something that exists in dresses only. Fashion is in the sky, in the street. Fashion has to do with ideas, the way we live, what is happening." — Coco Chanel
- Fashion communicates identity, status, group membership, rebellion, aspiration, and mourning — all without a word. Roland Barthes called it a "system of signs" as structured and readable as language itself.
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Slide 03
Fashion Before Modernity
- History
- Ancient
- Egyptian linen pleating and jewelry; Minoan bare-breasted bodices; Greek drapery system using single rectangular pieces pinned without cutting. Status indicated by fabric fineness, not silhouette.
- Medieval
- Sumptuary laws across Europe restricted luxury fabrics and colors by social rank — velvet for nobility, specific furs for royalty. Fashion as legislated hierarchy.
- Renaissance
- Slashing (cuts to reveal contrasting fabric underneath); padded doublets; ruffs; the silhouette as constructed geometry rather than draped cloth. Spanish austerity vs. Italian ornamentation.
- 17th–18th c.
- Versailles as fashion capital under Louis XIV; publication of fashion plates; the court as an engine of sartorial change; mantua-makers vs. tailors as gendered professional distinctions.
- 1800s
- Industrialization transforms production; synthetic dyes (1856) make color available at scale; Worth establishes the couture house model; the fashion system as we recognize it begins to take shape.
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Slide 04
The House System
- Haute Couture
- Haute couture — "high dressmaking" — was codified in Paris in the 1860s by Charles Frederick Worth, who established the model of the designer as artist-celebrity making exclusive custom garments for an elite clientele.
- What qualifies as couture
- The French Chambre Syndicale defines couture: custom-made for individual clients; made by hand in Parisian atelier; specific minimum number of full-time workers; biannual collection showings.
- The great houses
- Chanel, Dior, Balenciaga, Givenchy, Yves Saint Laurent — each established distinctive aesthetics that shaped ready-to-wear globally for decades after their founding moments.
- The business reality
- Couture is economically indefensible — 3,000–4,000 hours of labor per piece; a market of fewer than 2,000 clients globally; maintained as brand-building exercise and cultural signal for ready-to-wear licensing revenue.
- The new couture
- Japanese designers (Kawakubo, Yamamoto) disrupted couture conventions in the 1980s. Belgian conceptualists (Margiela, Demeulemeester) redefined craft's relationship to concept. The Antwerp Six changed who could be a couturier.
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Slide 05
Chanel: Inventing the Modern Woman
- Icons
- Coco Chanel (1883–1971) did not merely design clothes — she designed a new kind of woman and a new relationship between femininity and freedom that defined the 20th century.
- Borrowed men's fabrics (jersey, tweed) and made them acceptable for women's clothing at a time when women's fashion was defined by restriction, corsetry, and conspicuous discomfort
- The "little black dress" (1926) — Vogue called it "the Ford" because it would be universal; democratized elegance as a concept available beyond the wealthy
- Chanel No. 5 (1921) — First fragrance using synthetic aldehydes rather than a single flower; named for the fifth sample in the series; still the world's best-selling perfume a century later
- Chanel suit — braid-trimmed collarless jacket; loose skirt; no structural underpinning; liberating the female body from the S-curve silhouette that preceded it
- Costume jewelry — legitimized non-precious ornament as fashion statement; pearls worn with sportswear; the sign detached from the economic value of the signifier
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Slide 06
Christian Dior and the New Look
- Icons
- In 1947, Christian Dior launched his first collection and Carmel Snow of Harper's Bazaar exclaimed "It's quite a New Look!" — naming a silhouette that was simultaneously a radical departure from wartime austerity and a conservative return to pre-war femininity.
- The silhouette
- Padded hips and bust; nipped waist; full skirt to mid-calf; soft shoulders. Required yards of fabric at a time of post-war rationing — an immediate scandal and an immediate sensation.
- The political reaction
- Women's groups protested in the streets: "Dior is making the fashion world go back 50 years." The return of the waist and full skirt was read as an attempt to push women out of the wartime workforce and back into domesticity.
- The cultural impact
- The New Look defined fashion photography, advertising aesthetics, and aspirational femininity for an entire decade. Every fashion house had to respond — either embrace it or define their difference from it.
- Dior's legacy
- Died 1957; house continued under Yves Saint Laurent, then Marc Bohan, Gianfranco Ferré, John Galliano (creative heights; personal scandal), and now Maria Grazia Chiuri — first female artistic director.
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Slide 07
Fashion for Everyone
- Ready-to-Wear
- The industrialization of clothing production — prêt-à-porter (ready-to-wear) — democratized fashion across the 20th century, transforming it from an elite luxury into a mass cultural practice.
- Standardized sizing emerged from US Civil War uniform production; the military solved the problem of clothing many bodies at scale; consumer apparel followed the same logic
- Yves Saint Laurent showed the first luxury ready-to-wear collection in 1966 (Rive Gauche) — the couturier entering the mass market was a watershed that finally dethroned pure couture from cultural primacy
- The 1970s synthetic revolution — polyester, nylon, acrylic — made fashion affordable but disposable; the cultural memory of "cheap" synthetic fabric persists in consumer preference for natural materials
- Mall culture (1980s–1990s) in the US created a retail infrastructure where aspirational fashion brands could reach mass consumers through tiered pricing and brand licensing
- Online retail and direct-to-consumer brands (2010s) disrupted the wholesale department store system; brands could reach global customers directly, compressing the industry structure dramatically
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Slide 08
The Price of Cheap Clothes
- Fast Fashion
- Fast fashion — rapid production of inexpensive garments responding to runway trends within weeks — transformed the industry's economics and its environmental footprint simultaneously.
- The Zara model
- Inditex/Zara pioneered 2-week concept-to-store cycles; small initial production runs read by sales data; restocking hits; global vertical supply chain. 20 "micro-seasons" per year instead of 2.
- Ultra-fast fashion
- Shein, ASOS, Boohoo: 3,000+ new items per day; algorithm-driven trend identification; China-to-door supply chains so compressed that some items never exist as physical samples before production.
- Environmental cost
- Fashion is responsible for ~10% of global CO₂; 20% of industrial water pollution; 35% of ocean microplastics; Rana Plaza collapse (2013, 1,134 dead) made garment worker safety a global issue.
- The longevity gap
- Average garment worn 7–10 times before disposal (UK data). 85% of clothing ends in landfill or incineration. Secondhand market growing at 3× the rate of overall apparel market but cannot outrun production volume.
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Slide 09
Fashion From Below
- Street Fashion
- Fashion does not only flow from designers downward. The most generative periods in fashion history are driven by street cultures, subcultures, and youth movements that luxury houses then translate, appropriate, and sell back.
- Teddy Boys (1950s UK) — Edwardian long jackets, drainpipe trousers; working-class dandyism; the first specifically youth-generated fashion subculture in Britain; media moral panic before media fascination
- Mod (1960s London) — Mary Quant's miniskirt; geometric cuts; Carnaby Street; Twiggy; youth culture briefly more influential than Paris couture in setting global fashion direction
- Punk (1970s) — Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren; torn fabric, safety pins, bondage trousers as anti-fashion; nihilism aestheticized; quickly absorbed into mainstream fashion advertising
- Hip-hop (1980s–present) — Adidas, Kangol, Dapper Dan's luxury logomania; Timberland; baggy jeans; streetwear as the primary global driver of youth fashion for four decades
- Harajuku (Tokyo, 1990s–present) — Decora, Lolita, Gyaru; Japanese youth subcultures as the world's most consistently inventive street fashion laboratory
- Cottagecore, gorpcore, quiet luxury — Pandemic-era aesthetic micro-trends circulated at internet speed; TikTok as the new street-scouting; aesthetics named before they are fully formed
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Slide 10
The Business of Desire
- Luxury
- Luxury fashion is paradoxically the most culturally influential and economically unusual segment of the industry — selling scarcity, aspiration, and brand mythology at price points that exclude the majority who nonetheless define the brand's cultural meaning.
- LVMH
- Bernard Arnault built the world's largest luxury conglomerate: Louis Vuitton, Dior, Givenchy, Loro Piana, Tiffany, Sephora, Dom Pérignon — 75 Maisons across wine, fashion, perfume, jewelry, retail.
- Kering
- Gucci, Saint Laurent, Balenciaga, Bottega Veneta, Alexander McQueen; François-Henri Pinault's rival conglomerate; Alessandro Michele transformed Gucci from declining brand to maximalist cultural phenomenon in 4 years.
- The heritage narrative
- Luxury brands invest in archives, museums, and exhibitions to construct depth that justifies price premiums. The story of the founding atelier is as valuable as the current product.
- Logomania cycles
- Visible logos oscillate between vulgarity and desirability: dominant in 1980s–90s; abandoned for "stealth wealth" in 2000s; dominant again in 2010s streetwear moment; cycling back to quiet luxury in 2020s.
- Chinese market
- China now represents 35–40% of global luxury consumption; pandemic-era domestic spending transformed Chinese consumers from tourists buying abroad to primary market; daigou (personal shoppers) disrupted by crackdowns.
- Resale economy
- StockX, The RealReal, Vestiaire Collective; luxury resale growing 12% annually; authentication technology and brand cooperation transforming secondhand from stigmatized to aspirational.
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Slide 11
Fashion and the Politics of the Body
- The Body
- Fashion has never been neutral about bodies. Every silhouette, every sizing standard, every casting decision in a runway show encodes assumptions about which bodies are normative, desirable, and worth dressing.
- The corset (1500s–1920s) physically restructured the female torso to conform to a male-imagined ideal; medical literature of the era documented its health consequences; its decline was as political as its adoption
- The "sample size" standard (US size 0–2) for runway models effectively excluded most women's bodies from the aspirational imagery through which fashion sells itself
- Plus-size fashion — long marginalized to separate departments and limited styles — now an $18B US market; still underrepresented in high fashion imagery relative to its market share
- Ashley Graham (Sports Illustrated, 2016), Precious Lee (Versace runway, 2021), Paloma Elsesser (numerous covers) — representation expanding but advocates argue pace is commercially driven, not philosophically committed
- The body positivity movement and fat liberation politics assert that fashion's relationship to body norms is not merely aesthetic but has measurable effects on mental health, eating disorders, and self-conception
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Slide 12
Fashion and Gender
- Gender
- The gendering of clothing is more recent and more contested than its apparent naturalness suggests. What counts as "men's" versus "women's" clothing is historically contingent, geographically variable, and persistently challenged by fashion itself.
- The trouser revolution
- Women wearing trousers was illegal in Paris until 2013; culturally contested throughout the 20th century. Chanel in the 1920s, Katharine Hepburn in the 1930s, and wartime practical necessity each shifted the boundary.
- Men in skirts
- Kilts, lungis, dhoti, sarongs, gele — non-Western masculine dress traditions that include wrapped lower garments without cultural stigma. Western fashion periodically revisits the "man skirt" without normalizing it.
- Androgynous fashion
- Yves Saint Laurent's "Le Smoking" tuxedo suit for women (1966); David Bowie's Ziggy Stardust; Jean Paul Gaultier's men in skirts; Rei Kawakubo's deconstruction of gender categories as a formal principle.
- Contemporary gender-neutral
- Telfar, Palomo Spain, Thom Browne, Jonathan Anderson; runway shows casting across gender; "genderless" sizing in streetwear. Cultural conversation moving faster than retail infrastructure can follow.
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Slide 13
Tokyo's Revolution
- Japanese Fashion
- Japanese designers arriving in Paris in the 1970s–80s changed fashion's fundamental assumptions about what clothing was for — introducing deconstruction, asymmetry, poverty aesthetics, and a philosophy of imperfection that European fashion had to confront on its home territory.
- Issey Miyake — Pleats Please (1993): polyester pleating that maintains shape through washing and movement; exploring between body and cloth as the primary design space; technology-driven aesthetic that owes nothing to Western couture
- Yohji Yamamoto — Monochromatic black; asymmetrical hems; volume without structural underpinning; the body implied but not displayed; clothing as shelter and as philosophy of withdrawal from spectacle
- Rei Kawakubo / Comme des Garçons — "Hiroshima chic" (Paris press, 1981); holes and fraying as finish; lumps and bumps as silhouette; the 1997 "Body Meets Dress" collection with tumors of padding; conceptual fashion at its most uncompromising
- Junya Watanabe — Technical fabric innovation; patchwork denim; collaborative collections with Levi's, Comme des Garçons; craft at the intersection of craft tradition and industrial material
- Undercover (Jun Takahashi) — Horror iconography; punk ethos; subcultural depth; designed for people who live in the clothes, not for the runway alone
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Slide 14
Footwear as Fashion
- Shoes
- The shoe occupies a unique position in fashion — simultaneously the most functional garment and the one most loaded with symbolism, fetish, status, and cultural meaning across every civilization that has worn them.
- Roger Vivier and the stiletto
- The stiletto heel (1954) was engineered with a metal spike inside a slim heel to support weight that no previous narrow heel could bear. Christian Dior wore it for his 1954 New Look; it rewrote women's posture and cultural symbolism simultaneously.
- Manolo Blahnik
- The shoe as sculpture; drawn by the designer without technical training; made by craftspeople in Northampton; made globally known by Sex and the City as a shorthand for a specific kind of aspirational femininity.
- Nike Air Jordan (1985)
- Michael Jordan wore them; the NBA banned them (Nike paid the fines); the controversy was the marketing campaign. $162M in first-year sales. Sneaker culture as global subculture begins here.
- The sneaker market
- Sneaker resale is a $6B+ global market with its own investment logic, authentication industry, and cultural hierarchy. StockX processes millions of transactions monthly. The most coveted shoes exist in an economy of scarcity and speculation.
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Slide 15
The Fabric of Fashion
- Textiles
- Fashion begins with fiber. The history of textiles is the history of technology, trade, colonialism, and craft — and contemporary fashion's material choices are freighted with all of this history.
- Silk — Chinese monopoly for 3,000 years; Silk Road as the world's first global trade network; still synonymous with luxury; contemporary production centered in China, India, and Uzbekistan
- Cotton — American slavery built on cotton monoculture; British industrialization powered by cotton mills; the global garment industry still depends on cotton grown in conditions that regularly involve forced labor and child labor
- Wool — Merino as luxury fiber; wool's renaissance in sustainable fashion discourse because it is natural, biodegradable, and renewable; challenged by animal welfare concerns
- Synthetic fibers — Nylon (1939), polyester (1941), spandex (1958); enabled affordable clothing, athletic wear, and technical garments impossible in natural fibers; microplastic pollution as the delayed cost
- Sustainable alternatives — Tencel (wood pulp), Piñatex (pineapple leaf fiber), Mylo (mycelium leather), recycled ocean plastic; sustainable textiles as growing design constraint and marketing opportunity simultaneously
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Slide 16
The Politics of Color in Dress
- Color
- Color in fashion has never been merely aesthetic. Every era has loaded specific hues with social, political, and spiritual meaning — and the enforcement of those meanings has been as legal as it has been cultural.
- Tyrian purple
- Extracted from murex sea snails; 250,000 mollusks per pound of dye; reserved exclusively for Roman emperors and cardinals by law; "born to the purple" as the literal phrase for imperial birth.
- Mauveine (1856)
- William Perkin accidentally synthesized the first synthetic dye while attempting to make quinine. Mauve became fashionable instantly; synthetic chemistry made all colors democratically available for the first time in history.
- Black
- Mourning dress in Victorian England made black a mass-market fabric for the first time; Chanel made it chic; it became the neutral default of urban dressing; fashion capitals consistently dress in black as uniform and rejection of trend.
- The Pantone Color of the Year
- A marketing construct (since 2000) that has somehow acquired real market power: fabric suppliers, paint companies, fashion brands align production to the announced color. An invented tradition that became self-fulfilling prophecy.
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Slide 17
Fashion Imagery
- Photography
- Fashion photography created the visual language through which fashion became globally communicable — transforming a garment worn by one person into a cultural image consumed by millions.
- Richard Avedon — Moved fashion photography from stiff studio poses to movement, emotion, and narrative; "Dovima with Elephants" (1955); transformed Harper's Bazaar into an art platform; Nastassja Kinski and the Python; fashion as theatre
- Helmut Newton — Sexual power; fetishism; wealthy women as both subjects and objects; Monaco locations; controversy never reduced his influence; the image as provocation
- Irving Penn — Restraint and precision; white background as neutral space that concentrated attention on subject and garment; portraits of trades workers using the same aesthetic as fashion photography
- Cindy Sherman — Blurred boundary between fashion photography and fine art; Untitled Film Stills; Harper's Bazaar commissions that turned into feminist critique of the very magazine publishing them
- Steven Meisel — Madonna's Sex book; multiple Vogue Italia covers per year for decades; the most influential working fashion photographer; editorial as cultural provocation
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Slide 18
Fashion Weeks
- The Runway
- The biannual fashion week calendar — New York, London, Milan, Paris — organizes the industry's rhythm, establishes the hierarchy of design capitals, and increasingly exists more as media event than as trade show.
- The original purpose
- Trade shows where buyers from department stores placed orders for production. The runway show as viewing mechanism for wholesale customers; the press came later, and the celebrity audience later still.
- The spectacle explosion
- Alexander McQueen's "Highland Rape" (1995), "Plato's Atlantis" (2010, first show livestreamed via internet); Galliano's grand historical productions at Dior; the show as theatrical event distinct from the clothes it nominally presented.
- Who actually attends
- Buyers (fewer now; digital orders); press (print declining, digital growing); influencers and celebrities (primary marketing function); photographers; the runway show as content-generation event more than commercial transaction.
- The off-schedule challenge
- Thom Browne showed in New York then moved to Paris; Virgil Abloh's Off-White showed outside the official calendar; brands increasingly questioning whether the schedule serves their audiences or the industry's legacy institutions.
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Slide 19
The Streetwear Revolution
- Streetwear
- Streetwear emerged from skate culture, hip-hop, and surf in California in the 1990s — and by the 2010s had become the dominant global fashion aesthetic, with luxury houses abandoning their own traditions to participate.
- Shawn Stussy — Surf/skate brand that took on the visual language of hip-hop and urban culture; the first brand to successfully cross surf, skate, and hip-hop communities simultaneously (1980s)
- Supreme (1994) — James Jebbia; skate shop as cultural institution; limited drops as marketing model; logo as primary design element; the queue as spectacle and community ritual
- Virgil Abloh / Off-White — "Quotation marks" and diagonal stripes as ironic high-low signifiers; crossover between art world, music, and fashion; Louis Vuitton men's creative director 2018–2021
- The luxury crossover — Louis Vuitton × Supreme (2017); Dior × Stussy; Balenciaga adopting streetwear silhouettes wholesale; luxury brands seeking the cultural relevance that streetwear had accumulated through authenticity
- The hype economy — Limited releases, instant resale at 10× retail; brands manufacturing scarcity; the drop model replacing seasonal collection as primary retail strategy for certain brands
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Slide 20
Fashion's Ethical Reckonings
- Ethics
- The fashion industry is structurally challenged by a set of ethical contradictions that have moved from activist concerns to mainstream business discourse — though the distance between discourse and supply chain change remains enormous.
- Labor conditions
- 85% of garment workers are women; Bangladesh, Cambodia, Vietnam; Rana Plaza (2013) killed 1,134 and forced Accord on Fire and Building Safety — a rare legally binding industry agreement. Wage theft remains endemic.
- Cultural appropriation
- Recurring controversies: Navajo patterns by Urban Outfitters; bindis at Coachella; dashiki fashion in non-African contexts. The debate focuses on who profits, who has voice, and whether exchange can be distinguished from extraction.
- Animal materials
- Fur prohibitions spreading (California, London Fashion Week) after decades of activism; exotic leather challenged; down certification programs; wool auditing. The line between animal-derived and animal-harmed shifts continuously.
- Greenwashing
- H&M's "Conscious Collection," Zara's "Join Life" line — sustainability claims insufficiently supported by supply chain evidence; EU investigating misleading environmental marketing claims across the fashion industry.
- Size inclusion
- Most designer samples are made in size 0–2 and not available in extended sizes; "inclusive" campaigns feature plus-size models in limited product ranges; critics distinguish representation from meaningful product access.
- Circular economy
- Patagonia's "Don't Buy This Jacket" campaign; repair services; rental and subscription models (Rent the Runway); take-back programs; attempting a linear-to-circular business model transition with uneven results.
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Slide 21
The Accessory Economy
- Accessories
- Accessories — bags, jewelry, watches, scarves — generate a disproportionate share of luxury fashion revenue and carry fashion's most concentrated status signaling in the smallest possible format.
- The handbag as investment
- The Hermès Birkin has outperformed the S&P 500 over the last 35 years as an asset class (research by Baghunter, 2016). Hermès deliberately manufactures scarcity; waitlists exist for items Hermès chooses not to sell you until you've purchased enough else.
- Chanel 2.55
- February 1955 (hence 2.55): the first quilted chain-strap bag; freed women's hands; created a category that now drives billions in annual revenue. Raised prices 70% since 2019; the bag as inflation hedge.
- The watch economy
- Rolex, Patek Philippe, Audemars Piguet — mechanical watches in an era of precise digital time are pure status signals; Rolex Daytona waitlists measured in years; grey market and resale platforms valued at billions.
- Jewelry as wearable art
- JAR, Victoire de Castellane for Dior Joaillerie, Boghossian — high jewelry increasingly crossover with fine art; auction prices for period jewelry (Art Deco, Victorian) now rival contemporary art at Christie's and Sotheby's.
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Slide 22
When Fashion Enters the Museum
- Fashion and Art
- The relationship between fashion and fine art has oscillated between mutual anxiety and productive collaboration — fashion seeking legitimacy, art seeking the cultural reach that fashion's popular audience provides.
- The Metropolitan Museum's Costume Institute exhibitions (Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty; Camp: Notes on Fashion) attracted 650,000+ visitors — rivaling many fine art exhibitions for cultural reach
- Elsa Schiaparelli's collaboration with Salvador Dalí (lobster dress, shoe hat, tear dress): fashion as surrealist object and vice versa — the categories genuinely unclear
- Yves Saint Laurent's Mondrian dress (1965): primary colors in geometric blocks directly transcribed from the painting — fashion as reproduction and fashion as appropriation simultaneously
- Rei Kawakubo's work exhibited at the Guggenheim and the Met as art objects without apology — clothes hung without bodies, displayed as sculpture, assessed as conceptual art
- Virgil Abloh's exhibitions at ICA Boston and Mona (Hobart) before his death established his practice as simultaneously fashion, graphic design, and fine art — categories deliberately collapsed
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Slide 23
Fashion in the Age of Instagram
- Social Media
- Social media has restructured fashion's power hierarchies in less than 15 years — transferring agenda-setting authority from editors and buyers to influencers and algorithms, with profound effects on what gets made, who gets seen, and what "success" means.
- The influencer economy
- Fashion bloggers became "micro-influencers" then "mega-influencers" with 50M+ followings; brand deals displaced editorial coverage as primary fashion media; the line between editorial and advertising collapsed across every platform.
- The death of the gatekeeper
- Anna Wintour's Vogue once determined what was fashionable; today Vogue competes for attention with 22-year-olds posting outfit videos to 8 million followers. The editorial hierarchy has not disappeared but has dramatically fractured.
- Virality vs. longevity
- Items that "go viral" on TikTok (Stanley cups, Ugg minis, The Row quiet luxury) can sell out overnight — but the internet moves on within days. Brands face pressure to create viral moments that their supply chains cannot respond to at viral speed.
- Democratic access, concentrated attention
- Anyone can post fashion content; the platforms' algorithms determine who is seen. The apparent democratization of fashion media has produced a new hierarchy based on engagement metrics rather than editorial judgment.
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Slide 24
Race, Fashion, and Representation
- Race
- Fashion's relationship to race is long, complex, and often exploitative — an industry historically designed by and for white European aesthetics that has benefited from and appropriated Black, Indigenous, and other non-white creative traditions without proportional recognition or compensation.
- Dapper Dan (Harlem 1982–1992) created bootleg luxury logomania for hip-hop stars before brands sued him shut — then adopted his aesthetic and hired him into official collaborations
- Black models were excluded from major runway shows until the 1970s; Beverly Johnson's Vogue cover (1974) and Naomi Campbell's 1990s visibility were hard-won breakthroughs, not natural evolution
- Aurora James's 15 Percent Pledge (2020) committed retailers to allocating 15% of shelf space to Black-owned businesses — structural intervention rather than symbolic representation
- Virgil Abloh at Louis Vuitton, Olivier Rousteing at Balmain, Kerby Jean-Raymond at Pyer Moss — Black designers at the highest commercial levels for the first time
- African fashion capitals (Lagos, Dakar, Nairobi) generating culture increasingly independent of the Paris-Milan-London axis
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Slide 25
Fashion and the Planet
- Sustainability
- Fashion is one of the world's most polluting industries — and one of the most difficult to decarbonize, because its emissions are distributed across an extraordinarily complex global supply chain.
- Scale of the problem
- 10% of global CO₂; 20% of industrial water pollution; 35% of microplastic ocean pollution. If fashion were a country, it would be the third-largest polluter on earth.
- Regenerative agriculture
- Patagonia, Stella McCartney, and others investing in regenerative cotton and wool farming that builds soil carbon; potential to turn fiber agriculture from net emitter to carbon sink.
- Textile recycling
- Only 1% of clothing is recycled into new fiber; the technology exists but cost and infrastructure don't scale. Renewlane, Evrnu, Worn Again: chemical recycling startups working on polyester and cotton blends at commercial scale.
- Extended producer responsibility
- France's Refashion law requires brands to fund clothing collection and recycling. EU directive being drafted. Shifting the cost of disposal from consumers and municipalities to producers who profit from production volume.
- Secondhand market
- ThredUP, Depop, Poshmark: projected to be 2× the size of fast fashion by 2030. "Re-commerce" as the fastest-growing segment of apparel retail for three consecutive years.
- Slowdown as principle
- Vivienne Westwood: "Buy less, choose well, make it last." The brands that make clothes to last — Loro Piana, Margaret Howell, Nigel Cabourn — operate at the opposite tempo from fast fashion as both business model and ethical position.
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Slide 26
The Artisans Behind Fashion
- Craft
- Behind every couture garment and many luxury ready-to-wear pieces is specialized craft knowledge accumulated over generations — and much of this knowledge is disappearing as the artisans who hold it age without successors.
- Chanel bought and maintains Lesage (embroidery, 1924), Lemarié (feathers and flowers, 1880), Desrues (buttons and jewelry), Massaro (shoes), and others — protecting suppliers whose extinction would make couture literally impossible
- Italian textile houses (Loro Piana, Cappelli, Lanificio Leo, Vitale Barberis Canonico) represent centuries of accumulated knowledge about fiber, weave, and finish that cannot be simply replicated
- Savile Row's "golden shears" tradition: bespoke tailoring where a single suit takes 80+ hours of hand stitching; houses like Anderson & Sheppard, Huntsman, and Henry Poole maintain customer ledgers dating to the 19th century
- Obi-making in Nishijin, Kyoto: the most complex Nishijin-ori silk weaving involves 1,200 manually operated heddles; the knowledge is held by fewer than 50 weavers currently active
- The paradox: luxury brands celebrate craft while simultaneously pressure suppliers for lower prices that make craft economically unviable — an internal contradiction the industry rarely addresses publicly
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Slide 27
African Fashion Rising
- African Fashion
- African fashion is not a single tradition but a vast, diverse field of design cultures — and its growing global influence challenges the European-centered history of fashion that has dominated the industry's self-conception.
- Ankara and Kente
- Wax-print cotton (Ankara) was introduced by Dutch merchants in the 1800s but adopted and transformed by West African communities into a distinct aesthetic with regional pattern meanings. Kente cloth (Ghanaian) woven in ceremonially specific strips for specific occasions.
- Thebe Magugu
- South African designer; LVMH Prize winner 2019; "African studies" — research-intensive collections drawing on colonial history, apartheid archives, and Pan-African politics as design sources. Fashion as historiography.
- Lagos Fashion WeekGrowing alternative fashion capital; Arise Fashion Week, Lagos Fashion Week, Dakar Fashion Week — creating regional platforms independent of the European calendar and its institutional hierarchies.
- Diaspora influence
- Virgil Abloh (Ghanaian-American), Jerry Lorenzo (Force of Will), Kerby Jean-Raymond (Pyer Moss, Haitian-American) — diaspora designers bringing African cultural references into global luxury fashion without seeking European validation as prerequisite.
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Slide 28
Fashion's Tech Future
- Technology
- Technology is transforming fashion's design process, production methods, consumer experience, and the fundamental definition of what a "garment" is.
- 3D design and virtual samples — CLO3D software enables garments to be simulated physically before physical samples are cut; reducing sample production by 50–80% in some brands; pattern drafting to physical garment in virtual space
- Digital fashion — Dress X, The Fabricant: garments that exist only as digital images overlaid on photographs or 3D avatars; no physical production, no physical waste; the logical endpoint of fashion as pure image
- AI design tools — Trend forecasting via social media analysis; AI-generated print and pattern; generative design for silhouettes; the designer's role shifting toward curation of machine outputs
- On-demand manufacturing — Printing garments at point of sale; eliminating overproduction; requiring investment in alternative production infrastructure; currently economically viable only at premium price points
- Blockchain and authentication — LVMH's AURA platform; NFC chips in luxury goods; provenance tracking from fiber to finished garment; reducing counterfeiting and enabling resale authentication at scale
- Smart textiles — E-ink color-changing fabrics; haptic feedback integrated into garments; health monitoring woven into sportswear; the garment as technology product, not only textile product
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Slide 29
Fashion in 2025
- Current Landscape
- The fashion industry in the mid-2020s is navigating simultaneous disruptions that have no historical precedent in their combination: digital transformation, sustainability pressure, post-pandemic consumer behavior, geopolitical supply chain instability, and AI.
- Quiet luxury
- Anti-logo, muted palette, quality fabric — The Row, Loro Piana, Brunello Cucinelli; reaction against streetwear logomania; "Old Money" aesthetic on TikTok; the conspicuousness of inconspicuousness.
- The LVMH moment
- LVMH became Europe's most valuable company (2023); Bernard Arnault briefly world's richest person; luxury concentration accelerating — the gap between mega-brands and everyone else widening.
- China's complexity
- Recovering demand after COVID; domestic brands (Anta, Li-Ning) gaining cultural cachet at home; nationalistic consumer sentiment affecting Western brand reception; the simplest market narrative cannot hold.
- Resale normalization
- Secondhand no longer stigmatized; The RealReal, Vestiaire, Depop, Vinted mainstream; brands developing own resale programs (Patagonia Worn Wear, Balenciaga Pre-Owned); circular model gaining economic legitimacy.
- Physical retail reinvention
- Flagships as experience rather than transaction; appointment-only services; community programming; the store that sells less but builds the relationship that drives digital purchase behavior.
- Creative director churn
- Rapid turnover at major houses — Peter Mulier at Alaïa, Sabato De Sarno at Gucci, Haider Ackermann at Tom Ford; shorter tenures; the market for creative directors as competitive as any professional sport.
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Slide 30
We Are What We Wear
- Conclusion
- Fashion is frequently dismissed as superficial — and it is, by definition, a surface art. But the surface of a human body is also the interface between private self and public world, between interior experience and social existence. What we choose to put on that surface is never merely decorative.
- Fashion is where identity meets economy, where art meets industry, where the individual negotiates with the collective. At its best it is a form of daily poetry — a way of making beauty from fabric and time, of signaling who we are and who we want to become, of participating in the ongoing conversation between bodies and the societies they move through.
- "Fashion is the armor to survive the reality of everyday life." — Bill Cunningham
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