Thinking through Fashion: A Guide to Key Theorists, a volume edited by fashion scholars Agnès Rocamora and Anneke Smelik, is an important contribution to the establishment and canonization of the major theoretical perspectives that have arisen in the last thirty years in fashion studies. Rather than proposing innovative theoretical perspectives on the study of fashion, this book solidifies a preliminary canon for fashion theory and, more specifically, for those theorists—philosophers, sociologists, anthropologists, and psychoanalysts—who have been seminal in the study of the mechanisms of production and consumption of fashion or have been adopted by fashion scholars to unlock the practices of fashion. Here, fashion is not reduced to just the study of dress and the appearance of style in society but, as Rocamora and Smelik stress, is intended as a “material and symbolic system . . . made of things and signs, as well as individual and collective agents,...
The Practice of Theorizing Fashion
Marco Pecorari is program director of the MA in fashion studies at The New School Parsons Paris where he teaches and conducts research on fashion history and theory. He holds a PhD in fashion studies, obtained at Stockholm University (Department of Media Studies), and his dissertation, “Fashion Remains: The Epistemic Potential of Fashion Ephemera,” investigates the capacity of fashion ephemera to evoke and to call into question material and immaterial knowledge about fashion. He has recently published a chapter titled “Fashion Curating: Understanding Fashion through Exhibition” in the book Fashion Responses (2016) and “Contemporary Fashion History in Museums” in the book Fashion and Museum: Theory and Practice (2014).
Marco Pecorari; The Practice of Theorizing Fashion. Cultural Politics 1 March 2017; 13 (1): 125–128. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/17432197-3755298
Download citation file:
Advertisement