Skin and Surface: Fashion and Culture

Undergraduate

What do we mean by fashion? This course explores the intimate relationship between film, fashion, and various modes of self-fashioning and unfashioning. By examining the sartorial—what, or whom, we wear—in literature and film, we consider the ramifications of style in discourses on race and gender. We study films, novels, and photography that focus on garments in ways that highlight the complex relationship among material histories, social fabrics, and notions of the corporeal and the human. Along the way, we unsettle the easy yet stubborn distinction between surface and interiority. From Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo to Wendell B. Harris’s Chameleon Street, Frederick Wiseman’s documentary of department stores to Lee Bul’s cyborg sculptures, this course asks: how does fashion constitute—or unravel—our notions of the self and of the world as “surface” activity? HU W 4pm-5:55pm