Theory has never been as fashionable in the fashion industry as it is today. While Gucci’s artistic director, Alessandro Michele, quotes Gilles Deleuze in his press releases, Dior’s press officers employ psychoanalytic theorists to contextualize their house’s collections. To shed light on this noteworthy phenomenon, Parsons Paris faculty members Antoine Bucher, Marco Pecorari, Justin Morin, and others recently presented research to reflect on this “fashion of theory” in a scholarly presentation and accompanying exhibition, A Fashion of Theory, mounted at the Mona Bismarck American Centre for Arts and Culture last May. Their goal: to explore issues that over time have characterized the study of fashion in both academic and non-academic circles. Anchoring their study were questions such as, How has fashion been studied? By whom? In which contexts? What perspectives on fashion have been developed? 

Their research path led them to dissect traditional definitions of fashion as the “child of capitalism.” This characterization, a consequence of the fashion industry’s incessant drive to create and consume the “new,” considers fashion, in concept and practice, as both causes and effects of the expansion of capitalistic society, conspicuous consumption, and class differentiation. It is through this lens that economist and philosopher Thorstein Veblen, a founder of The New School in New York in 1919, wrote the book Theory of Leisure Class, which was published in 1899. Drawing on Karl Marx’s work, Veblen saw dress as a central evidence of the ways in which social struggle, waste, and economic power are staged in capitalistic societies. These perspectives often associated fashion with femininity, futile adornment, and frivolousness and, most importantly, were spurred by a moral critique of luxury and capitalistic ideology.

Bucher, Pecorari, and Morin crystallized their inquiry into an exhibition that challenged visitors to rethink traditional, early assumptions and stereotypes about fashion, including those of Veblen. Their installation, which enlisted the graphic design and organizational support of MA Fashion Studies student Olivia Johnston, invited the public to take in historical and contemporary fashion-related books, videos, documents, and magazines. Materials on view were arranged into sections reflecting six themes:  La Mode Qui Court, A Creative Fashion, Fashion of History, Fashion Geographies, Identities and Bodies of Fashion, Through the Looking Glass. Taken together, the themes offer a new definition of fashion as a cultural phenomenon while highlighting the construction and deconstruction of a canon in the academic field of fashion studies. 

A Fashion of Theory project team:

Concept: Marco Pecorari
Research and Curation: Antoine Bucher, Marco Pecorari
Exhibition Design Concept: Justin Morin
Graphic Design and Coordination: Olivia Johnston, MA Fashion Studies ’19
Communication: Lisa Sarma and PR Consulting