Clothes and the City: Urban Fashion in Literature and the Visual Arts

(4 Credits)

Whether we “dress for success” or wear our pajamas to the grocery store, the clothes we put on our body all have a meaning. Though clothes are an essential part of our everyday life, do we ever stop and think about what they signify, and how they are perceived by people who look at them? We explore the representation of urban fashion in cities across the globe—Paris, London, New York, Hong Kong, Constantinople, Kinshasa, and Brazzaville—from the nineteenth century to the present, in a range of texts, films, paintings, and graphic novels that enable us to grasp the importance of clothing to issues of gender, social class, sexuality, and (post-) colonialism. Students engage in observing the clothes of New York City, take on a set of clothes-hunting journeys, and look carefully at the ways people dress in various neighborhoods.