Reframing Fashion Studies: Performance, Gender, and the Body 2020

In the 1997 inaugural issue of the academic journal Fashion Theory: Journal of Dress, Body, & Culture, Valerie Steele defined “fashion” as the “cultural construction of an embodied identity.” Two decades later, in their edited volume Thinking Through Fashion, Agnès Rocamora and Anneke Smelik only modestly expanded the definition to identify “fashion as referring to dress, appearance, and style” and “a material culture and symbolic system.” To trouble these constrictive interpretations, this workshop orients fashion within a broader study of the body itself, a discursive site upon which fashion studies and its attendant disciplines of visual culture, anthropology, sociology, and history overlap. Central to this inquiry are theoretical practices more traditionally situated within performance, gender, and critical race studies. The objective is to reconceptualize the field of fashion as something more than a cultural construction by unearthing the interwoven set of corporeal, social, and theoretical operations that structure fashion’s logic and foster its material manifestations.