COLIT-UA 550: French Fashion, Taste & Style

French Fashion, Taste, and Style Course description: Clothing is a text to be read in modernity, and authors and artists from Baudelaire to RuPaul mobilize sartorial performativity in powerful ways. Fashion functions, for example, as a semiotic or communicative system, as a mnemonic device, as an erotic signifier, as a tool for bourgeois self-fashioning, and as a force of anti-normative subversion. In this course, students will gain a critical vocabulary for discussing literary and cinematic style. We will pay special attention to the implications of sartorial style for the production, reproduction, and rescripting of gender norms, and to the centrality of irony in both the fashion system and in queer theory. Among our concerns: early modern vs. modern self-fashioning; clothing as the materialization of memory; commodity fetishism; the subcultural force of decadence, primitivism, and punk; the invention of the “dandy”; androgyny and gender performativity; design and the proliferation of vernacular aesthetic categories (glamour, kitsch, coolness, cuteness, etc.); and the relation between literary, cinematic, and sartorial styles.

College of Arts and Sciences, Comparative Literature
COLIT-UA 550 | 4 units | Class#: 20081