Department of English

In this class we will study the emergence of the concept of the "new" as a term understood as "new fashion." What is the “fashion of the new,” and how is the concept linked with the material production of fashion ? After having surveyed the political functions of fashion as an tool of control from the Renaissance to the end of the eighteenth century, we will focus on Queen Marie-Antoinette as an agent of transformation. After this revolutionary moment, the idea of the modern emerged in the 19th century, an idea brought forward by discourses on fashion elaborated by poets like Baudelaire and Mallarmé or sociologists and philosophers like Georg Simmel and Walter Benjamin. We will move back and forth in time so as to analyze today’s changing scene with a view to identify contemporary accounts of the "new" in the context of the fashion industry. Our cultural mapping of fashion will lead us to discuss Baudelaire and Mallarmé, read Aragon's Surrealist novel Paris Peasant. We will analyze more than ten films documenting the genealogy of fashion and discuss creators like Yves Saint-Laurent, Rei Kawabuto, Martin Margiela, Alexander MacQueen and Rick Owens. The Fashion Theory: A Reader will serve as a theoretical guide.