The Culture, Fashion, and Society Notebook 2021 - E-book - PDF

In 1990, Karen Hanson wrote about the "philosophical fear of fashion", a pervasive dismissal within philosophical circles, not just ofthe contemporary fashion system per se but more broadly towards fashion for its undeniable connection with change, materiality and, particularly, the body. This suspicion meant a lack of dedicated research, which Hanson attributed to "philosophy's suspicion ofchange; anxiety about surfaces and the inessential; failures in the face of death; and philosophic disdain for, denial of, the human body and human passivity".
Thirty years on, things have changed significantly. Fashion and the body are established topics - even fields of studies - in the social sciences and humanities: the journal Body and Societywas launched in 1995, Fashion Theory in 1997. Needless to say, this is not because the related anxieties have gone away, rather it is becausethey have become much more urgent and impossible to repress, animating public as well as academic debate.
This volume testifies tothe richness of these growing fields, and, in keeping with the Notebook tradition, offers a variety of approaches, in particular expanding- though not exclusively - the myriad ways in which fashion can function as a magnifying lens to question major trends in society. Fashion, the body and its representation both as individual body and as the social body of more or less inclusive and stable imagined communities are examined in the essays that follow through different methodologies and disciplines.
With a distinctive flair for interdisciplinarity, the essays that follow provide rich insight into some of the ongoing original research in a growing and increasingly established field.