(Fully Online Postgraduate by Coursework Elective)

Why do high-heeled shoes feature in the television series Sex and the City? How are fashion, gender and sexuality linked? Why can women now wear a cheongsam dress and trainers? Who were the sapeurs and why, despite abject poverty and unemployment, were they driven to emulate the sartorial elegance of Parisian haute couture in the African Congo?

Driven by the relentless and potent forces of aesthetic innovation and international economics, fashion exerts an underestimated force in shaping societal norms, values and behaviours. This fully online course exposes the significant intersection and overlap of sociological, cultural studies and fashion theory and examines dress as a vehicle for self-fashioning since the 1980s. It will present a variety of advanced theoretical methods to interpret the fashion choices of post-modern society.

Presented as a rigorous, wide ranging cross disciplinary perspective on the phenomena of fashion, the course expands on and discusses the contributions and contradictions in the theoretical propositions of Veblen, Simmel, Hebdidge and others in the context of dress. You will study themes including fashion and identity politics; fashion design and the street; gender and consumerism; cross-cultural dressing. You will examine topics including Japanese 'cuteness' (kawaii); the spectacle of the contemporary fashion parade, dress and sexuality; sub cultural representation and re-inscription; and the emergence of the global fashion brand as social locator of the individual in society.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Students will receive course website location and log in instructions via their UNSW email account prior to the commencement of the course.