Fashion Cultures and Histories – Research Seminar Series: Edition 2022/2023

The history of Paris fashion has largely been told as a story of high fashion, of individual creativity and genius, of exclusive and perfect products, glossy images, and the enduring figure of La Parisienne. Fashion here has been largely promoted by media, advertising, and tourism as an essential element of global Western modernity, rooted in the city of Paris. The commercial and cultural narrative of Paris as “world capital of fashion” – as enticing and economically successful as it may have been and still is – has had significant consequences that have not been sufficiently analysed and call for a transdisciplinary critical enquiry.

This seminar series aims to deconstruct dominant narratives around “Paris fashion”, to contribute to the re-writing of de-hierarchized and de-centralized fashion histories. To do so, it builds on and brings together seminal research, practices and perspectives; and it proposes to shift the focus of research towards:

• ignored people and places: The seminar aims to capture the diversity of the social spaces of fashion by focusing on the garments workers who are the actors behind the scenes – often immigrants, seamstresses, tailors, sellers, collectors, recyclers. Placing individuals at the centre of the production of fashion allows us to rethink the conditions of its development and appreciate the people who make our clothes for their skills, knowledge, experience and creativity. This, in turn, will enable a reconsideration of the cost and value of clothes.

• unacknowledged objects, materiality and processes: by taking up the question of fashion, not only as a tool to study something else, but as an object of study in its own right. Fashion is not only a representation but also, above all, it is matter: textiles involve touch, sight and smell. Fashion is often presented as a perfect, de-contextualised product, without human or material traces. Yet production processes, material complexities, and environmental impacts have to be included in a de-hierarchized narrative. Moreover, the study of Paris fashion needs to move away from the exclusive object to the everyday and everyplace.

• hidden global flows and relations: Described as the centre of global commercial and economic circulations, “French fashion” was exported world-wide without sufficient analysis and acknowledgement of the fabrics, pattern, colours, techniques and aesthetic styles imported to make this very fashion. Fashion was for too long constructed as an exclusive and emblematic creation of Paris. This seminar series will question the origins and motivations of this Parisianism, to reconsider the geopolitics of “French fashion” and propose a new spatial geography of fashion.

• overlooked knowledges & methodologies: Bringing together diverse narratives of what, where and why fashion is and was. By foregrounding diverse ways of studying Paris fashion, the seminars will facilitate new fashion histories, new fashion knowledge, and reconsidered methodologies. The challenge is both material (new documents to be studied) and, above all, intellectual: it necessitates a reconsideration of the nature, scope and use of fashion data and archives.