Fashion faculty at Pratt Institute and Parsons School of Design teaching fashion history and theory.

Contextualizing Fashion: This course explores the mechanisms that create meaning in and through fashion and investigates how clothing is presented in myriad contexts, looking at historical sources, scholarly texts and contemporary media.

Made in NYC: Narratives of City, Identity & Affect: In an attempt to disrupt the canonical and exclusionary framing of fashion histories, this course will embark on a collaborative exploration of New York’s fashion archives that have been forgotten or deliberately omitted from the prevailing narratives. Conducted through readings of fashion history, media representations, lectures, discussions and analyses of extant materials, this course will consider the racial, socio-economic and political forces that have written the history of Made In NYC. Employing digital humanities methodologies, with support from experts in the fields of information studies, archives and research, the class will collaboratively launch a public-facing digital project to analyze and bring to light an under-theorized area of New York’s fashion history.

Advanced Research Seminar: Fashion: This course approaches research as a resource of imaginative and critical inquiry for artists and designers. Students will embark on their own semester-long research project, directly related to their creative practice, that engages visual and narrative history, as well as critical theory. The Fashion inflection explores fashion as object, image, text, practice, theory, and concept. Using a range of interdisciplinary research methods, students will develop a critical understanding of fashion and its manifold global intersections with identities, histories, and cultures. How does fashion speak? What information do we derive from the vast system of material, image, body, history and site within the social and global sphere? Students will engage with such complexities while interrogating new ways to approach topics such as form, beauty and sustainability.

NYC: Fashion: This course will introduce students to “New York Fashion” as a socially constructed aesthetic style and a fashion capital. Beginning with the city’s early ascent as an industrial district to New York Fashion Week and the micro-economies developed by today’s style influencers, New York has provided a space for promise, progress and mobility within the world of fashion. Topics of discussion include what New York makes possible for emerging designers, how New York-based art and educational institutions celebrate fashion, how the borough of Brooklyn has situated itself as a cultural brand, and how New York provides an incubator for the latest advancements in design and technology.