The Rise of Fashion Studies

NEWS | September 15, 2020

The term "fashion studies" refers to the interdisciplinary field that examines fashion from an intellectual point of view. From Valerie Steele to Pascale Gorguet-Ballesteros, a look at what happens when fashion and theory interweave:

The study of fashion as a "legitimate" object of research is relatively recent. University departments often judged it too superficial, seeing it as little more than a question of business. If the German philosopher Georg Simmel and sociologist Pierre Bourdieu attempted to theorize it in the latter half of the 1900s, they were ahead of their time — fashion remained separate from university programs until the close of the 20th century.

Today, "modology," or "fashionology," is turning the tables and specialized university departments have multiplied. More often called "fashion studies," the departments began to proliferate in American universities in the 90s. Valerie Steele was one of the discipline's early leaders, teaching fashion in New York through an interdisciplinary prism that drew on history, sociology, and even psychoanalysis. In Great Britain, academic and activist Elizabeth Wilson explored it through a socio-cultural lens colored by feminist logic and questions oriented around identity. In France, fashion studies began to crop up in higher education in the 2000s. 

Since then, fashion has come to the fore as an object of scientific knowledge and a tool of social analysis. In 2017, the Institute Français de la Mode and the University Paris 1, commonly known as the Sorbonne, began offering a doctoral diploma entitled "Theories and practices of fashion," seeking to develop our understanding of the industry and drawing heavily on the humanities and social sciences like Law and Economy. In 2013, the Sorbonne had already begun to offer classes in the history of garments and fashion under the direction of Pascale Gorguet-Ballesteros, a conservator and Director of Heritage at Palais Galliera, Paris' municipal museum of fashion. At the Paris Institute of Political Studies, Serge Carreira offers an interdisciplinary conference cycle entitled "General Introduction to Fashion and Luxury," a subject in which he is a leading specialist. Alongside all this, a new group of emerging French doctorates like Geraldine Blanche are preparing theses dedicated to subjects like intellectual property in the fashion industry, deepening our knowledge of fashion in years to come. 