The Fashion Businessstudies debate. Summarized by the term “New Times”, the discussion was
taken up by Marxism Today and signalled, according to Angela McRobbie,
“the diversity of social and political upheavals in Britain... including the
success of Thatcherism, the decline of a traditional working class politics,
the emergence of a politics of identity and consumption, and most importantly
the challenge these represent to the left”.^33 It cannot be easily claimed that
fashion history has arisen out of a political consensus in the way that cultural
studies obviously has, but nevertheless the implications of the New Times
debate have important repercussions for the study of objects which cannot
be divorced from questions of status, gender, sexuality and national identity.
Though the terms of New Times were complex and inward-looking, the
emergence of a new politics of identity and consumption offered genuine
opportunities for novel approaches and arguments, represented particularly
in works on clothing, fashion, shopping and gender. Recent publications,
from Caroline Evans’ and Minna Thornton’s overview of fashion and
femininity in the twentieth century,^34 through to Frank Mort’s study of
Burton’s in the 1950s^35 or Sean Nixon’s examination of menswear and men’s
magazines in the 1980s,^36 show some residue of the arguments. Any
discussion of consumption and its (dis)contents requires precisely the kind
of close political analysis that cultural studies methods can provide, and used
in conjunction with other, more empirical methodologies its application can
often lead to the most provocative and exciting insights.
It is a shame then that the cultural studies slant often seems to raise
aggressive or defensive shackles amongst dress historians, as it does amongst
historians generally. It is undoubtedly a field riven with disagreements, and
coming to a consensus on what the study of culture actually entails is a
minefield. In this sense it would be a mistake to isolate cultural studies at all
as a desired or necessarily coherent position, more valid than any other. It is
an interdisciplinary field where certain concerns and methods have converged.
The usefulness of this convergence is that it can enable us to understand
cultural phenomena and social relationships that were not accessible through
other disciplines, thus enriching our knowledge of an object category (fashion)
that has clearly always played a central role in cultural/social processes. It is
not a unified field, but one of argument and division as well as convergence,
and therein lies its strength and promise. The dress historian Lou Taylor’s
- McRobbie, Angela, Postmodernism and Popular Culture, London: Routledge, 1994.
- Evans, Caroline and Minna Thornton, Women and Fashion. A New Look, London:
Quartet, 1989. - Mort, Frank, Cultures of Consumption: Masculinities and Social Space, London:
Routledge, 1996. - Nixon, Sean, Hard Looks, London: UCL Press, 1997.