Taught By:
K Adele Okoli
Associate Professor of French
University of Central Arkansas
kokoli@uca.edu
Read profile here.
Course Description:
This course examines the legal, cultural, and visual history of fashion in the French-speaking world, from the medieval period to the 21st century, in conjunction with theoretical writings on the subject in English (some in translation). In developing students’ understanding of the history of fashionable dress and comportment, this course will also encourage their cultivation of a theoretical framework with which to analyze this knowledge. Students will learn to explore the function and meaning of fashion in a broad range of historical and social contexts, including movements and moments in contemporary fashion. They will engage ever-evolving practices of dress in France and the Frenchspeaking world with an emphasis on social performances of gender, sexuality, class, political ideology, and national identity through self-fashioning.
Throughout the semester, some of our guiding questions will be the following: What do trends in apparel, accessories, body contour, cosmetics, and coiffure reveal about the societies that establish and diffuse them? How have concepts of beauty and taste—aesthetics—evolved through time and space? What is the role of ideology in design? How have historical events and technological developments influenced fashion? What is the historical relationship of sartorial expression to establishments of institutional, social, and individual power? In what ways has fashion been in conversation with other cultural forces such as art, literature, and film? Why do so many philosophers, writers, and artists throughout the centuries have something to say about fashion, and why are these essays, treatises, and passages so often neglected by scholars?
Class discussions will be conducted in English.
