The Invisible ManWestern Architecture demonstrates the practitioner’s insight and inside
knowledge in exploring the social, industrial and ideological background to
historical building.^13 It is quite usual for successful architects, not only to
teach, but to publish books and articles giving perspectives on historical and
contemporary design issues or outlining personal manifestos; the tradition
stretches back through history from Robert Charles Venturi, Philip Johnson,
Le Corbusier and Palladio to the Roman architect Vitruvius.
Fashion can never match architecture’s long pedigree, but comparison of
the two disciplines’ relative theories leads to some interesting issues concerning
their dominion. Whereas in architectural theory, practitioners hold a signifi-
cant or predominant stake, in fashion theory it is the historians and academics
who are the custodians, if not proprietors. This chapter aims to invert custom;
this time, a practitioner scrutinizes the work of those who have scrutinized
fashion. The purpose of doing so is not to disparage or decry, but to
demonstrate where extant work disappoints the student and practitioner of
fashion, to suggest how the designer’s perspective might allow it to be
reconstituted as a complete entity, how it may advance understanding of the
subject, possibly remove some of the stigma attached to it and even elevate
the lowly professional status of fashion and fashion design.
The next section presents a series of salient and interconnected themes
drawn from consideration of what is regarded as the academy of fashion. It
concentrates principally on those works which appear in the general reading
list already referred to, which includes Fashion Theory. Some texts and
references to exhibitions which are not named in the reading list have been
used where they shed further light on themes of contemporary interest. The
final part of the chapter is a short case study from my own experience as a
fashion designer, intended to reinforce some of the points made in the second
section and to illustrate the kind of text of which there is a paucity in the
academy of fashion.
The Fashion PolyglottApart from the absence of any significant contribution by the practitioner,
the most obvious observation on the body of academic discourses relating to
fashion is the bewildering variety of its authors’ disciplines. Students of
fashion, so frequently labelled as shallow and frivolous, are required to be
polyglotts, able to inform their understanding from texts using the language
and ideas of anthropology, social, cultural, economic and art history,
- Riseboro, B., The Story of Western Architecture, London: Herbert, 1979.