SOCI 2217 - Critical Theories of Fashion and Culture

Arts & Sciences Department
This class encourages students to use critical theoretical frameworks to think about fashion. The class examines fashion as not just a commercial industry, but as what the Frankfurt School of critics called the Culture Industry: a cultural, social, and political phenomenon that can be analyzed, systematized, and interpreted. Specifically, the class explores fashion’s unique role in questions of race, class, gender, nation, and sexuality. The class will seek to understand the ways fashion creates meaning for and about individuals based on these concerns. Ultimately the class is dedicated to achieving a fluency in the cultural studies movements of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries to understand fashion consumption and mediation.
credit(s): 3
Prerequisite(s): ENGL 1100