Introductory description

Fashion and Literature addresses cultural narratives of garment production and consumption, with a particular focus on how works designated as "literature" and garments designated as "fashion" intersect in accounts of daily life.

Module aims

Outline syllabus

This is an indicative module outline only to give an indication of the sort of topics that may be covered. Actual sessions held may differ.

Term one: systems
1: theories – economics Gogol, “The Overcoat”
Karl Marx, “The Commodity”
Peter Stallybras, “Marx’s Coat”
Michael Carter, “Stuff and Nonsense”
2: theories – gender Virginia Woolf, “The New Dress” Mary Wollstonecraft, from “Vindication of the Rights of Women”
Roland Barthes, from The Langue of Fashion and The Fashion System
From Deirdre Clancy, Costume Since 1945
Taylor, Lou. “Fashion and Dress History: Theoretical and Methodological approaches”
3: theories - desire Sigmund Freud, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” and
From Jacques Lacan, Seminar, Book VII
J. Entwistle, ‘Addressing the Body’
4: theories Fashion Theory: A Reader section 1 (Vinken and Bourdieu) and section 2 (Simmel, Sapir, Davis)
5: Victorian era Jane Eyre Steele, Valerie. “Art and Nature: Corset Controversies of the Nineteenth Century”
6: READING WEEK
7: Victorian era Jane Eyre Madeline Seys, “Tweed and Wool”
Houghton, Eleanor. “Unravelling the Mystery: Charlotte Brontë’s 1850 ‘Thackeray Dress’.”
8: Victorian era James, “The Romance of Certain Old Clothes”
9: Victorian era The Picture of Dorian Gray Wilde, “The Philosophy of Dress”
10: Victoria era The Picture of Dorian Gray From Abigail Joseph, Exquisite Materials

Term two: cases
1: New Looks – Postwar Britain Spark, The Girls of Slender Means
2: 1950s Selvon, The Lonely Londoners
3: 1950s The Lonely Londoners
4: 1950s McInnes, Absolute Beginners
5: 1950s Absolute Beginners
6: READING WEEK
7: The Case of Virginia Woolf Woolf, Orlando Lucky McKeon, “Virginia Woolf: Fashion Influencer?”
8: Woolf, Orlando Collections: Christopher Bailey (Burberry, 2016), Kim Jones (Fendi Couture, 2021)
9: Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
10: Woolf, Mrs. Dallowy

Term three: student curation
Weeks 1-3, student presentations on a single garment in a literary text

Learning outcomes

By the end of the module, students should be able to:

• Demonstrate coherent and detailed knowledge of how garments have narratives, and in turn how these are narrated in cultural texts
• Display an appreciation of the economics of clothing, both historically and in our present world. In particular, students will become aware of what labour fashion showcases and hides in creating the seamless surface of a garment
• Understand the historical and contemporary importance of fashion and of clothing-related commodities to the British economy, historically and in the present moment
• Think critically about what stories we assemble when we put on clothing ourselves
• Exhibit an advanced command of written English together with a wide-ranging and accurate vocabulary
• Apply confident textual analysis and fluent critical argument to initiate and carry out an extended essay
• Conduct independent research through self-formulated questions
• Produce work that displays the qualities and transferable skills necessary for employment requiring the exercise of personal responsibility and decision-making, along with collective engagement

Indicative reading list

Malcolm Barnard, Fashion Theory: A Reader; Roland Barthes, The Fashion System and The Language of Fashion; Deirdre Clancy, Costume since 1945: Historical Dress from Couture to Street Style; Fred Davis, Fashion, Culture, and Identity; Anne Hollander, Seeing Through Clothes and Sex and Suits: The Evolution of the Modern Dress; John Styles, ‘Chapter 2: What the People Wore,’ in The Dress of the People: Everyday Fashion in Eighteenth-Century England; Peter McNeil, ‘Chapter 5: “Pretty Gentlemen”: Macaroni Dress and Male Sexualities’ and ‘Conclusion: “Fashion Victims”; or, Macaroni Relinquishing Finery’ in Pretty Gentlemen: Macaroni Menand the Eighteenth-Century Fashion World; Christopher Breward, ‘Gentlefolk in Town: 1800-30,’ in The London Look: Fashion from Street to Catwalk. eds. Breward, Christopher, Ehrman, Edwina, and Evans, Caroline; Claire Hughes, Dressed in Fiction; Fred Davis, ‘Do clothes speak? What Makes Them Fashion?’ in Fashion, Culture, and Identity; Rebecca Arnold, ‘Fashion in Ruins: Photography, Luxury and Dereliction in 1940s London.’ Fashion Theory, 21:4 (2017); Erica Pirarelli, ‘Windrush Style, 1948.’ in Afrosartorialism: A Research Project on fashion and streetstyle sartorialism from Africa. 22 June 2015. Online; Fred Davis, ‘Antifashion: The Vicissitudes of Negation’ in Fashion, Culture, and Identity.

Research element

Two research papers will allow students to practice our garment-based method of literary analysis.

Interdisciplinary

Module draws on concepts from anthropology, psychology, Fashion Studies, Performance Studies, history, philosophy, Gender Studies, War Studies, and the History of Sequins.

International

One case study each year will address some element of fashion practice among global majority populations. Student-curated weeks will be encouraged to have an international focus, as well.

Subject specific skills

• Critical reading and writing, of literary texts and of economic narratives around clothing;
• Independent research, using both academic methodologies and the study of popular culture; • Demonstrate a conceptual understanding that enables the development and sustaining of a critical argument; • Describe and comment on recent research and/or scholarship in subject; • Make appropriate use of scholarly reviews and primary sources; • Exhibit an advanced command of written English together with a wide-ranging and accurate vocabulary; • Apply confident textual analysis and fluent critical argument to initiate and carry out an extended essay; • Conduct independent research through self-formulated questions; • Produce work that displays the qualities and transferable skills necessary for employment requiring the exercise of personal responsibility and decision-making, along with collective engagement

Transferable skills

• mastery of the forms and narratives of garments and of the fashion industry
• awareness of the economic basis of a creative industry