Fashion in the Classroom: It’s not just stunting in your new outfit
Graphic by Agnes Lee
Fashion and art history are connected in several facets of the fashion world — look at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute and brand collaborations with artists. But what about fashion’s presence in art-historical academia? Although we might think that there is little connection between fashion and art history in universities, there are interesting crossovers.
At the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) in New York, students can minor in Fashion History, Theory and Culture, which offers courses directly related to both fashion and art history. The two required courses, History of Western Costume and Clothing and Society, provide the students with an overview of western costume history, from ancient to contemporary times. Some examples include The History of African Textiles and Fashion, which surveys African art through a fashion lens by analyzing the history of African dress and adornment, and History of Fashion Photography, where students investigate fashion photographers and their works dating from the 19th century to the present.
Other options for elective courses include Fashion and Impressionism, which studies modern fashion amidst the emergence and success of the Impressionist artistic movement. Twentieth-Century Fashion and Art focuses on studying 20th century fashion designers and their use of various artistic mediums (photography, illustrations, films, etc) as inspirations. The last two courses were taught in the past by Professor Justine Renée De Young, a Northwestern alum with an MA and PhD in art history. De Young is also the founding editor of Fashion History Timeline, which features articles written by FIT students on interesting and unexpected topics that connect both fashion and art history knowledge, such as a Late Medieval European saddle or Jan Jansz Mostaert’s Portrait of a Black Man.
However, fashion courses are not limited to institutions like FIT. In fact, art history departments at many non-fashion-driven universities also offer a variety of fashion history classes. At Barnard College, ProfessorAnne Higonnethas taught Fashion Revolution, Instagram Art History. Her class examines a newly released set of fashion plates, which are illustrations of clothing styles from between 1797 and 1804. This set of fashion plates, originating from the Journal des Dames et des Modes, displays the latest fashion styles and customs of the time, such as reading and other forms of entertainment. Most interestingly, the Journal des Dames et des Modes dismissed the 18th century French fashion standards marked by immobility by supporting more comfortable clothing styles. Yet, such a radical change for women caused its reversion after 1804 while men’s new style continued to exist in 19th century French society.
Woman artist wearing relatively comfortable clothing. Image courtesy of StyleRevolution.
A plate titled “Cornett under a veil. Decorations in circular ruffles” shows a woman wearing a loose dress likely without common 18th century women’s undergarments such as the corset and pannier. In addition to the avant-garde fashion aspect, this particular plate illustrates an unusual behavior for 18th century French women: drawing. At this time, the art market was predominantly composed of male artists. Her artistic endeavor, along with her free flowing, un-corseted attire, would have been seen as quite radical.
There were indeed a very small number of female artists in 18th century France, including Adélaïde Labille-Guillard and Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun. These women were prominent female artists amidst a majority of male artists who predominated the art market at that time. Higonnet has also taught a class called Clothing, which examines fashion theories and how they relate to issues such as gender roles, craft traditions, textile trade, royal sumptuary laws, environment and whether certain styles were disruptive to a specific culture and historical context. Currently, Higonnet is teaching Introduction to Art History II, which explores global media dating from 1400 to 2021, including some fashion-based elements.
In addition to these courses offered at Barnard College, this spring quarter, Northwestern’s Art History department is offering a class titled Fashion, Race, and Power. Taught by Professor Alicia Caticha, the course “considers the history of 18th- and 19th-century fashion through the lens of European colonialism and the Atlantic slave trade.” ProfessorAlicia Catichais invested in the relationship between art history and fashion, as seen in her publication, “‘Neither Poets, Painters, nor Sculptors’: Classical Mimesis and the Art of Female Hairdressing in Eighteenth-Century France,” and “Madame Récamier as Tableau Vivant: Marble and the Classical Ideal in Beyoncé and Jay- Z’s Apesh*t,” .
To provide our readers with exclusive insights into these classes, STITCH has reached out to Caticha and Kristin Merrilees, a Barnard undergraduate student currently enrolled in Introduction to Art History II. Both kindly offered to answer some questions, which have been edited and condensed for clarity. With these questions in mind, we hope to contrast opportunities to learn art history with a fashion lens at Barnard and Northwestern.
STITCH: How do you think that students majoring in other areas, not only art history, will benefit from this class?
Caticha: We all wake up and we all put on clothes. We may not think anything of it, but it actually means something. Not only do we use fashion to express ourselves, but when we put on clothes, we participate in society, in economic systems, in upholding certain cultural traditions. We make those choices every day. My goal for this class is to explore those choices in a historical context so that we can understand the present.
STITCH: How do you think that this course has made you rethink certain facets of art history?
Merrilees: Before taking this course, which was my first introduction to art history, I thought the field was mostly about memorizing artists, dates and works of paintings. However, I now realize it is so much more than that. It encompasses intellectual and cultural movements, political thoughts, geographic locations, aesthetics, pop culture and more. The art also isn’t limited to simply paintings or sculptures. We’ve learned about imperial gardens, Japanese tea ceremonies and houses, classical architecture, calligraphy and women’s fashion during the 18th century. It’s been super interdisciplinary and has really broadened my understanding of art and culture.
STITCH: Why did you choose to focus this course on 18th- and 19th-century fashion? Do you think this is an ideal time period to study the history of fashion and its connections to colonialism?
Caticha: The easy answer is the fact that I am a specialist in 18th- and 19th-century art, so, of course, I think it’s the time period to study! But don’t worry, I won’t take the easy way out. Eighteenth-century Europe really marks the development of the consumer culture that we experience today in our daily lives, and it only grows exponentially in the nineteenth century with the development of the department store and the eventual production of ready-to-wear clothing. During this period, we see an expanding middle class with disposable income, we see the development of a fashion press that sets the trends in a way that simply didn’t exist previously to 1700. And yet this story has always been told without discussing one of the reasons that all of this could happen: colonialism and the establishment of a global economy that centered around the Atlantic slave trade. It would not be an honest accounting of the history of the fashion industry as we know it without tackling this darker history.
STITCH: How has learning about fashion history shaped or reshaped your notion of the contemporary fashion industry? Can you give examples of connections between, for example, an 18th century painting and a current clothing brand?
Merrilees: Learning about different fashions and art styles throughout history has helped me understand how we decorate our surroundings and wear certain clothing to express and inspire ourselves. In one class, we learned about “hyperobject,” something superfluous, in various historical cultures. For example, a 15th century Chinese cobalt blue and white piece of porcelain. We connected the concept to shoes from Virgil Abloh’s “The Ten,” a collaboration between Nike and Off-White, and talked about how they could be considered superfluous “hyperobjects.” We also talked about some more modern work, like Kehinde Wiley’s 2020 Portraits of Savannah Essah, in which the subject wears track pants with a stripe down the side of them (a design also seen in Adidas and Gucci garments).
When learning about women’s costumes in late 18th century Paris, I learned that what one wears –– and its fabrics, colors, designs, etc. –– tells a lot about their identity and societal role. Seeing the class taking fashion as a legitimate form of art has been awesome. Although I don’t have a background in artistic movements or famous painters, I like using clothing to express myself and try new styles out. Considering architecture, Instagram photos, household objects and fabrics as forms of art has made the entire field much more interesting and accessible to me.
STITCH: Why did you choose to teach this course? Why is it important to study the European history of fashion together with colonialism?
Caticha: I have always loved fashion and I have always wanted to teach a course on fashion! Fashion introduced me to history and it introduced me to the history of art. I don’t think it’s shameful to admit to loving the romance of a big, old-timey dress. After all, I know that I wouldn’t be a scholar of eighteenth-century French art if I didn’t love fashion.
It’s also important to question our fantasies and our understanding of history. When I began to learn about the history of fashion in my early twenties, I started where most people begin: Coco Chanel in the early twentieth century, the history of Vogue, Paris in the 1970s and 80s. Soon, I was reading about how Coco Chanel was a Nazi sympathizer and how Vogue silenced the voice of one of its most charismatic editors, André Leon Talley. The real shock to me, however, was learning about the experiences of Yves Saint Laurent and Karl Lagerfeld as gay men during the AIDS crisis. The AIDS crisis completely decimated the Parisian fashion world and that is just a history we don’t talk about. When I began to study the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, I wanted to know the real story—not a sugar coated one. I wanted to understand why women wore what they wore beyond just looking at the evolution of dress styles. A full understanding of colonialism and the effects it had on the fashion industry was the only solution.
STITCH: How would you describe this course’s contribution to shedding light on a diverse history of fashion that has been disregarded over time? For instance, in the course description, one of the questions to be discussed is “how has the history of European fashion systematically erased the contributions of Black women and women of color?” Can you elaborate on this question?
Caticha: I wish I could say that I was going to completely open up our eyes to a new host of designers and women who we can point to and so easily say, “Look what she accomplished!” or “Why don’t we study her or know about her?”
Unfortunately, because of these acts of erasure, we have little left in the archives to help us tell their stories, but we can study the act of that erasure itself. We can look at the surviving clothes and trace their origins to understand who actually came up with certain designs, who made specific fabrics. Many fashions from circa 1780-1815 became fashionable in Europe only after enslaved and free women of color in the Caribbean had been wearing such outfits for decades! Yet, when we watch movies depicting this time period, such as Jane Austen flicks or even Bridgerton, we never think “Oh wait, their outfits are actually a form of cultural appropriation,” or “They are wearing outfits made by enslaved women.”
My goal in this class is to begin thinking beyond what we see or what we think we see. We will trace the objects back to their moment of production and give long overdue credit to the many people whose stories and labor have been erased from the historical record. It doesn’t solve the continual whitewashing of the history of fashion, but it is a start.
Resoundingly then, fashion is an inseparable facet of art history —in academic texts, courses, fashion design, and many others. Fashion is often a vehicle for artists to communicate their messages and critiques of a myriad of issues. For example, in Gustav Klimt’s “Mäda Primavesi” (Figure 2), Klimt utilizes the girl’s dress design to indicate the prestige and sophistication of her family, who commissioned the artwork. This fashion element also contrasts with the girl’s own account (according to the Met’s description of the canvas) of being “willful and a tomboy.”
The fashion and art history curricula have become increasingly interconnected. However, like the discipline of art history itself, there is still so much change necessary, such as the order of study and what is and is not chosen to be included in the curriculum. Shedding light on non-inclusive aspects of fashion and art history studies is the initial first step to improving this nuanced subject.
Portrait of Mäda Primavesi (1903-2000). Image Courtesy of Metropolitan Museum of Art.