Fashion Matters

Fall 2009

Fashion Matters: Clothes, Bodies and Consumption in East Asia

Listed in: Asian Languages and Civilizations, as ASLC-29

Faculty

Paola Zamperini (Section 01)

Description

(Offered as Asian 29 and Women’s and Gender Studies 13.) This course will focus on both the historical and cultural development of fashion, clothing and consumption in East Asia, with a special focus on China and Japan. Using a variety of sources, from fiction to art, from legal codes to advertisements, we will study both actual garments created and worn in society throughout history, as well as the ways in which they inform the social characterization of class, ethnicity, nationality, and gender attributed to fashion. Among the topics we will analyze in this sense will be hairstyle, foot-binding and, in a deeper sense, bodily practices that inform most fashion-related discourses in East Asia. We will also think through the issue of fashion consumption as an often-contested site of modernity, especially in relationship to the issue of globalization and world-market. Thus we will also include a discussion of international fashion designers, along with analysis of phenomena such as sweatshops.

Limited to 20 students. Fall semester. Professor Zamperini.

Course times and locations

ASLC 29 - L/D

Section 01
M 12:30 PM - 01:50 PM WEBS 220
W 12:30 PM - 01:50 PM WEBS 220

Offerings

2024-25: Not offered
Other years: Offered in Spring 2008, Fall 2009, Fall 2011