Cultures, Identities, HistoriesBritish art colleges and polytechnics during the 1960s further encouraged a
separate provision for contextual and historical studies in clothing and textiles
that has probably influenced the semi-detached nature of fashion in the design
historical canon ever since.
Related disciplines, including cultural studies and media studies, have
arguably taken the politics of identity and appearance – “fashion” – closer
to their core, but tend to concentrate on contemporary issues and confine
themselves, in tandem with art history, mainly to the study of representation
and promotion, using social anthropology and semiotics as tools to define
meaning. Significantly, cultural studies finds its history in a literary rather
than a visual tradition, and objects of study reflect those roots, existing as
texts to be decoded in the present, rather than reflections or remains to be
recovered from the past. Whilst much of this work has found its way through
to the teaching of fashion students with their more pressing contemporary
interests, broader historical issues have remained largely beyond their concern.
This brings me to my own limited intervention in the field, a textbook
designed to present fashion history in the context of contemporary historio-
graphical debate.^4 In the face of a potentially confusing and contradictory
conflict of interests, I aimed to incorporate elements of art historical, design
historical and cultural studies approaches in an attempt to offer a coherent
introduction to the history and interpretation of fashionable dress. Used
together carefully, these methods promised to provide a fluid framework for
the study of fashion in its own right. They could also be set within a wider
argument concerning the nature of cultural history generally, which has
fostered concepts of diversity rather than prescriptive or narrowly defined
readings of historical phenomena. Roger Chartier in his essay that appeared
in Lynn Hunt’s anthology of new historicist writings outlines the problems
in his discussion of the concepts of “popular” and “high” culture, an area
especially pertinent to the history of fashionable clothing and the dynamics
of cultural studies:
First and foremost, it no longer seems tenable to try and establish strict correspond-
ences between cultural cleavages and social hierarchies, creating simplistic
relationships between particular cultural objects or forms and specific social groups.
On the contrary, it is necessary to recognize the fluid circulation and shared practices
that cross social boundaries. Second, it does not seem possible to identify the
absolute difference and the radical specificity of popular culture on the basis of its
own texts, beliefs or codes. The materials that convey the practices and thoughts- Breward, Christopher, The Culture of Fashion, Manchester: Manchester University Press