The seminar “Fashion and Cultural Studies II” provides a critical review of current theoretical, political, and cultural debates that shape fashion today.  This term, the course's theme is “Mapping Fashion and its Discontents” and it is an invitation to pause and reflect on the fashion system as we know it, and to ask critical questions, to envision alternatives and to discuss new possibilities for the critical and necessary renewal of fashion. The course aims to re-assess what Theodor W. Adorno calls “das Ganze”: that is, the big picture of how the problematic facets of the fashion industry are connected to larger social, cultural and economic developments, and ultimately, to the crisis of capitalism.

The course maps four current sites of transformation in fashion:

• fashion and neoliberalism,
• labor conditions in the garment industry,
• fashion and sustainability,
• fashion design as activism

After situating fashion and its discontents on a temporal and spatial topography of transformation, the final aim of the course is for students to write an essay with a self-chosen topic related to the course’s main themes.

The class will be a seminar with a high expectation of participation. Students have to come to class prepared to participate actively in class discussions and discuss the assigned readings.

Participation is crucial in this class because we will rely on in-class discussion to facilitate our analyses of the course texts. It is my hope that you will learn as much (or more) from each other as you will from me. Class participation means more than how much you say in class; it’s your effort to be present—both in mind and in body—in our discussions.

Attendance is particularly crucial in a discussion-based course.

To receive credits for this course, you have to fulfill the following requirements:

• There is an 80% attendance requirement for courses.
• Active participation in the class discussions and group assignments
• Submission of the final assignment

Final assignment:
Write a speculative narrative that explores the future of fashion (focusing either on fashion consumption, fashion design, fashion production, the fashion industry as a whole or fashion education – as you wish), taking into consideration the topics explored in this semester (exploitation of labor, exploitation of the environment, creative crisis of the fashion industry, global supply chains, global sweatshop, obsolescence of retail spaces, etc.).   Margaret Atwood defines speculative fiction as literature that deals  with possibilities in a society which have not yet been enacted but are  latent. Any technology or fantastical element in speculative fiction  ought to have roots in what our current species can already do, or is on  the road to being able to do. Applied to your writing assignment, the speculative narrative you develop should be rooted in the knowledge you have acquired about the structure of the global fashion industry throughout this semester. For whom will your fictional world be a utopia and for whom a dystopia?   As a reference and inspiration, read the chapter “The Camille Stories” from Donna Haraway’s book “Staying with the Trouble - Making Kin in the Chthulucene”. Also, have a closer look at the writing style of Ursula K Le Guin in her book “The Left Hand of Darkness”. Both texts can be found in the base-folder for this course.

• Mensitieri, Giulia, 2020 [2018]: The Most Beautiful Job in the World. Transl. Natasha Lehrer. London/New York: Bloomsbury, p. xi-10 and 55-79.
• Hoskins, Tansy, 2014: Owning It. In: Stitched Up. The Anti-Capitalist Book of Fashion. London: Pluto Press, pp. 14-32.
• Alessandra Mezzadri, 2017: The Chain and the Sweatshop. In: The Sweatshop Regime: Labouring Bodies, Exploitation, and Garments Made in India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 16-41.
• Worker’s Rights Consortium, 2021: Fired, Then Robbed: Fashion brands’ complicity in wage theft during Covid 19. Research Report, April 2021.
• Fletcher, Kate and Mathilda Tham, 2019: Earth Logic Fashion Action Research Plan. London: The J J Charitable Trust.
• Loscialpo, Flavia, 2023: Ethno-Racial Capitalism within Contemporary Fashion: Forced Labour and the Uyghur Crisis. In: Almila, Anna-Mari and Serkan Delice (eds.), 2023: Fashion's Transnational Inequlities: Socio-Political, Economic, and Environmental. London/New York: Routledge p. 29-46.
• Von Busch, Otto, 2022: Making Trouble: Design and Material Activism. New York/London.
• Haraway, Donna, 2016: Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham/London: Duke University Press.