A Passion for Fashion: Dressing up French Literature and Cinema

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

Whether we "dress for success" or wear our pajamas to the grocery store, the clothes we are putting on our body all have a meaning. Though clothes are an essential part of our everyday life, do we really stop and think about what they really signify, how they are perceived by people who look at them? In urban environments, where millions of fellow city-dwellers can scan the clothes that everyone is wearing, fashion often has a more significant meaning. Dressing up is such a mundane action we barely wonder why we do it, but shouldn't we consider this act an art? Fashion has been a crucial aspect of literature, cinema, paintings, and graphic novels. Text and textile both mediate a form of language, and fashion is indeed an idiom in itself. In this course, you will explore the representation of fashion in literature, cinema and the arts. We will dive into a range of texts, films, paintings, and graphic novels that will enable us to better grasp the importance of clothing surfaces, their meaning, implication, and significance regarding issues related to gender, social class, sexuality, and (post-) colonialism. An individual's identity, personality, and desires are both inscribed on and influenced by the clothes he or she is wearing. The large set of signs that are carried by fashion therefore constitute a closed system of signification, linked with culture itself as well as the senses. The course aims to give students an insight into a broad range of visual and textual materials, as well as to develop their analytical and critical skills. During each class, students will be asked to discuss the themes emerging from the visual and textual materials, supported by the critical readings related to them. The objective of this interdisciplinary course is also, through materials spanning across a broad variety of genres, media, places and periods, to provide the students with an open and intercultural approach of the humanities. Finally, the course aims to develop the students' awareness of their place within a globalized world in which the image of the self - often carried by clothes - is predominant. This puts into perspective the socio-political questions of gender, race, class, colonialism, and sexuality. Taught in French.