ABSTRACT
Fashion is often seen as a slightly silly and certainly superficial interest or practice that people tend to associate with youth and dizzy individuals, rather than art, design or society, and consequently tend to dismiss as of only minor importance. The slippery relationship of the high-flown world of specialist haute couture to the more mundane and widespread use of the high street in particular has also created more coals for the funeral fires of fashion. These factors in turn start to have consequences for the politics of fashion which I consider in Chapter 6, where I also analyse more contemporary and often more politically motivated perspectives on the development of fashion, such as those derived from subcultural studies. It is my intention here, therefore, to consider those perspectives which either preceded or laid their roots prior to these later developments. In the first instance, though, it is worth explaining and unpacking the
foundations of the study of fashion that were first developed a hundred years or so ago and are still in place today. The study of fashion, like fashion itself, has its foundations in art and design, or at least in the history of art and design. Indeed, the study of fashion today is still primarily located in the confines of arts departments rather than the social sciences. It is this factor which accounts for much of the apparent and immediate distortion in the study of fashion, or the modern, western and haute couture focus that simultaneously locates and yet often omits consideration of the social context of dress. More importantly, as mentioned in Chapter 1, the earliest analyses of fashion were essentially costume histories, graphic accounts of dress through the centuries that were often painstakingly researched and skilfully compiled, yet which often opened up a complete omission, in fact a void, of theory. These texts, which are still in production today and used frequently as source books for courses in art and design, act as excellent reference texts, yet are at their weakest, with some exceptions, in explaining how and why fashion has come to claim its contemporary importance, its politics, or simply its fascination (Chenoune, 1993; Gibbings, 1990; Martin and Koda, 1989). This situation started to change in the 1970s and 1980s with the advent of cultural studies, the rise of more sociological and anthropological analyses of fashion and
second wave feminism. However, it is worthwhile considering their early forerunners in the study of fashion for, as we shall see, these still form many of the mainstays of the contemporary analyses of fashion: in short, they constitute a classical tradition.
