The Fashion Businessof the nineteenth-century sociologist Veblen^1 and semiotician Barthes^2 , but
the volume of contemporary discourses has brought these formerly remote
texts right to the heart of what now constitutes fashion’s academy.
Inevitably, given the broad range of disciplines that have entered what
Lou Taylor has described as the ‘dress history ring’,^3 there has been some
quite heavyweight methodological pugilism. With the principal combatants
now in a more conciliatory mood, the consensus seems to be for a multi-
disciplinary approach. Yet the reconciliation of historical and theoretical
approaches does not complete the debate; there is a voice whose absence is
overlooked, but which is blindingly obvious. Amongst the entire body of
academic work relating to fashion, there is scarcely a word written by a
practising designer, or giving a designer’s perspective. Designers like myself
are as invisible in the academy of fashion as they are in the glamourized
celebrity designer profiles manufactured by the press.
It is scarcely credible, but nonetheless true, that of the many thousands of
graduates and postgraduates that have passed through our celebrated fashion-
design education machine, with its more or less standard diet of 80 per cent
practice and 20 per cent theory, none has published work which makes a
significant contribution to the academic understanding of their field.
Just as fashion is sometimes regarded as occupying the lowest intellectual
rung of the design ladder, architecture is regarded as occupying the highest.
With this in mind, I compared the general ‘theoretical and contextual studies’
reading list issued to first-year students of the first degree course in Fashion,^4
- Veblen, T., The theory of the leisure class: an economic study of institutions,
London: Allen and Unwin, 1970. - Barthes, R., The fashion system (translated from the French by Matthew Ward and Richard
Howard) London: Cape, 1985. - Taylor, L., ‘Doing the Laundry: A Reassessment of object based Dress History: Fashion
Theory, vol. 2 issue 4, Oxford: Berg, 1998, pp. 337–58. - The ‘general’ reading list for first-year students of Fashion at Kingston contains the
following:
Ash, J. and Wilson E. (eds), Chic Thrills: A Fashion Reader, 1992.
Barnard, M., Fashion as Communication, 1996.
Barnes, R., and J. Eicher J. B., (eds), Dress and Gender: Making and Meaning, 1992.
Barnes R., and Eicher J. B., (eds), Dress and Gender: Making and Meaning, 1993.
Barthes, R., The Elements of Semiology, 1967.
Barthes, R., The Fashion System, 1983.
Bordo, S., Unbearable Weight: feminism, western culture and the body, 1993.
Bourdieu, P., Distinction, 1986.
Boynton Arthur L., (ed.), Religion, Dress and the Body, 1999.
Breward, C., The Culture of Fashion, 1995.
Brydon A., and Niessen, S., Consuming Fashion: Adorning the Transnational Body, 1998.