Thinking through fashion: a guide to key theorists

The field of fashion is now a major topic of enquiry in social and cultural theory. However, students often find it difficult to apply key social and cultural theoretical frameworks and concepts to their study of fashion. This book is designed to fill this gap for a how to think through fashion. Each chapter is a guide through the work of a selected major thinker, such as Marx, Freud, Simmel, Benjamin, Bakhtin, Barthes, Goffman, Deleuze, Foucault, Baudrillard and Butler, introducing key concepts and ideas, discussing how they have been appropriated by various authors to engage with the topics of fashion, dress and appearance, and looking at other ways in which they can be taken over to reflect on these topics.

Thinking through fashion: an introduction / Agnès Rocamora and Anneke Smelik -- Karl Marx: fashion and capitalism / Anthony Sullivan -- Sigmund Freud: more than a fetish: fashion and psychoanalysis / Janice Miller -- Georg Simmel: the 'philosophical Monet' / Peter McNeil -- Walter Benjamin: fashion, modernity and the city street / Adam Geczy and Vicki Karaminas -- Mikhail Bakhtin: fashioning the grotesque body / Francesca Granata -- Maurice Merleau-Ponty: the corporeal experience of fashion / Llewellyn Negrin -- Roland Barthes: semiology and the rhetorical codes of fashion / Paul Jobling -- Erving Goffmann: social science as an art of cultural observation / Efrat Tseëlon -- Gilles Deleuze: bodies-without-organs in the folds of fashion / Anneke Smelik -- Michel Foucault: fashioning the body politic / Jane Tynan -- Niklas Luhmann: fashion between the fashionable and old-fashioned / Aurélie Van de Peer -- Jean Baudrillard: post-modern fashion as the end of meaning / Efrat Tseëlon -- Pierre Bourdieu: the field of fashion / Agnès Rocamora -- Jacques Derrida: fashion under erasure / Alison Gill -- Bruno Latour: actor-network-theory and fashion / Joanne Entwistle -- Judith Butler: fashion and performativity / Elizabeth Wissinger.

The field of fashion is now a major topic of enquiry in social and cultural theory. However, students often find it difficult to apply key social and cultural theoretical frameworks and concepts to their study of fashion. This book is designed to fill this gap for a how to think through fashion. Each chapter is a guide through the work of a selected major thinker, such as Marx, Freud, Simmel, Benjamin, Bakhtin, Barthes, Goffman, Deleuze, Foucault, Baudrillard and Butler, introducing key concepts and ideas, discussing how they have been appropriated by various authors to engage with the topics of fashion, dress and appearance, and looking at other ways in which they can be taken over to reflect on these topics.

The field of fashion is now a major topic of enquiry in social and cultural theory. However, students often find it difficult to apply key social and cultural theoretical frameworks and concepts to their study of fashion. This book is designed to fill this gap for a how to think through fashion. Each chapter is a guide through the work of a selected major thinker, such as Marx, Freud, Simmel, Benjamin, Bakhtin, Barthes, Goffman, Deleuze, Foucault, Baudrillard and Butler, introducing key concepts and ideas, discussing how they have been appropriated by various authors to engage with the topics of fashion, dress and appearance, and looking at other ways in which they can be taken over to reflect on these topics.