Clothing (National Education Equity Lab)

Human beings create second, social, skins for themselves. Across history and around the world, everyone designs interfaces between their bodies and the world around them. From prehistoric ornaments to global industry, clothing has been a crucial feature of people’s survival, desires, and identity. This course studies theories of clothing from the perspectives of art history, anthropology, psychology, economics, sociology, design, and sustainability. Issues to be studied include gender roles, craft traditions, global textile trade, royal sumptuary law, the history of European fashion, dissident or disruptive styles, blockbuster museum costume exhibitions, and the environmental consequences of what we wear today. This course teaches you how to think more consciously, more analytically, and more ethically about something we all do every day: get dressed. First, the course gives you thought tools from a range of academic disciplines, allowing you to understand the powerful human impulses that drive clothing. These essays are among the most enduringly relevant their fields have produced. Next, you learn the history of European clothing in a global context, to recognize the fashions of different times, and understand the world politics of clothing. Finally, the course turns to issues of sustainability and memory, so that you can assess the impact of your wardrobe choices, as well as of the fashion industry, on our planet.