HKUK0361FU Art History/Visual Culture/Theater: Fashion as Cultural Performance - refining, re-shaping, relating bodies

This course deals with the aesthetics, history and theory of fashion. We will investigate the functions of fashion as a performative, cultural and social practice. What social, cultural and gender norms regulate/have regulated the clothing in historical and contemporary everyday performances? How do these norms relate to the body and its actions and movements?

Furthermore, we will address the question how fashion is presented and located: in catwalk performances, photographs and videos. The existing conventions associated with these media will be subject to investigation. How do fashion and costume determine movement on and off stage?

Not least, we will investigate fashion’s critical potential. Can celebrity performances, such as Lady Gaga’s, that make use of techniques like quoting and cross-dressing, be read as critical towards certain norms?

Besides reading and discussing theoretical and historiographical fashion texts, we will carry out catwalk and detail analyses to illuminate how the staging of fashion popularises, taboos or normalizes body concepts.