History: Fashion's Empires

Topics examining historical themes and questions on a global scale. May repeat for credit with different content. Topics vary by offering; periodic offering at intervals that may exceed four years. Prerequisite: Three hours of History.

Prereq: 3 hours History PACE students with permission and override

In this course we will explore the history of fashion, tracing how innovations in dress and adornment have helped construct identities, shape politics, and power economies in the modern world. Focusing on the period from roughly 1700 to 1950, the course situates fashion against the backdrop of global empires. On the one hand, we will explore how desires for new things to wear drew together different parts of the world—in highly unequal relations—through the movement of materials, practices, technologies, and capital. The race to secure brightly colored Indian cottons, for instance, sparked fierce European trading competition across Asia, ultimately inspiring the industrial revolution (which focused on cotton production) and chemical innovation in dyes, but also British colonial domination of India. On the other hand, we will examine how different groups used fashion choices to express particular identities, often in opposition to others. The 1940s zoot suit, with its baggy, pleated pants, long, padded-shoulder jackets, and fancy hats, for instance, became a masculine favorite first to express distinctive East Coast Black and West Coast Latino identities, before later becoming the dress of white icons like Frank Sinatra. This will be a discussion-based course (with roughly 40-60 pages of reading per class), focusing on how fashion has shaped history.

Course assessment will be based on discussion participation, two short papers, a presentation on a particular object of dress (the felted beaver top hat, the white wedding dress, the children’s sailor suit, the corset, the Nehru jacket, the three-piece suit, for example), and a final research project.