Book Review: Teaching Fashion Studies
Edited by Holly M. Kent, Teaching Fashion Studies, Bloomsbury, $32.95, 312 pp., August 2018
Between a global pandemic and surge in conversations around racial equality, the need to reassess how we teach fashion feels more urgent than ever. Of course, the need to reform fashion education is far from new, but educators are likely to face increased scrutiny as students have become more aware of the type of institutionalized racism that’s inherently set within the global fashion system — as well as their own universities.
An unprecedented number of fashion brands and designers have attempted to demonstrate their commitment to valuing diversity in recent years, whether it be done in good faith or for attracting positive publicity. However, a failure to prioritize inclusivity in fashion education has hindered long-term progress. In a recent op-ed for Business of Fashion, Professor Ben Barry rightly admitted that, “How we teach fashion reinforces a narrow set of worldviews and skills that remain rooted in the continuing legacies of the transatlantic slave trade and European colonization— upholding a white supremacist, gender binarist, ableist and fatphobic approach to fashion.”
Ben Barry is Chair and Associate Professor of Equity, Diversity & Inclusion in the School of Fashion at Ryerson University, which has made inclusion and decolonization the core principles that guide their school’s curriculum. While some schools like Ryerson are committed to providing their instructors with the tools and support needed to challenge and deconstruct these problematic approaches to fashion, most schools don’t provide teachers with the proper training and resources they need to prioritize inclusivity and propagate anti-racist perspectives in their classrooms.
“As we were discussing Charles Frederick Worth and fashion in the early 1800s, a student raised her hand to ask me why I hadn’t included any Black people in my PowerPoint presentation. At that moment, it felt like I had the wind knocked out of me as a flood of realizations rushed through my mind.”
My own moment of reckoning occurred in the first fashion history course that I taught many years ago, which was labeled as a general survey of “Western Costume.” A few weeks into the semester, as we were discussing Charles Frederick Worth and fashion in the early 1800s, a student raised her hand to ask me why I hadn’t included any Black people in my PowerPoint presentation. At that moment, it felt like I had the wind knocked out of me as a flood of realizations rushed through my mind: Why hadn’t I noticed this before? What other groups had I neglected to include in my presentation? And was there ever a time that I had questioned this white, Eurocentric approach as a student taking similar classes? Although these embarrassing omissions were not intentional in any way, I was still stunned by my own complicity in the perpetuation of racist narratives in fashion history.
So, how can instructors begin to fix these issues? The book Teaching Fashion Studies seems like an unlikely place to start, being that it certainly wasn’t created for the purpose of making systemic changes in fashion education. It can, however, help to broaden the perspectives of educators by demonstrating the complex nature of this field, which is especially important for teachers who are entering fashion studies from outside disciplines. In the interest of working towards decolonizing fashion education, this book review will highlight the content that could be most beneficial for teachers who want to diversify their course curriculum and propagate inclusivity.
But first, let’s begin with the central issue: Instructors do, in fact, need to learn how to teach fashion studies. More often than we’d like to admit, new teachers enter the university system when a class needs to be filled and other options have run out. While tenure-track professors do exist in decreasing amounts, two-thirds of faculty are now “contingent faculty,” a broad classification that includes adjuncts, full-time non-tenure-track faculty, and graduate teaching assistants. Since part-time positions need to be filled quickly, many contingent faculty members fall into teaching by being in the right place at the right time, or having the right connections (myself included). Without having any prior teaching experience, new instructors are often expected to fill three hours of class time for fifteen weeks without being given much more than an outdated syllabus template.
Most part-time faculty are competing against other teachers for the same classes, dismayed by semester-long contracts that create a perpetual fear of being replaced by someone new. As a result, many experienced teachers are hesitant to share their lesson plans and syllabi with new teachers, thus limiting the spread of knowledge and ideas. Additionally, contingent faculty are usually limited in their ability to develop new curricula and have little freedom in the classes they take on, leading many to struggle to teach topics that fall far outside of their areas of expertise. On top of that, contingent faculty are often staffed at the last minute, leaving little time to prepare for the classes they teach. Many schools also don’t offer faculty development seminars or pedagogical workshops for part-time faculty, and when they do, it’s not always possible for contingent faculty to take advantage of these crucial resources since they are often splitting their time across multiple jobs in order to make ends meet.
These reasons, combined with the emotional labor involved with teaching (a subject that warrants further discussion), are why resources like Teaching Fashion Studies need to exist. Edited by Holly M. Kent, Associate Professor of History at University of Illinois-Springfield, each chapter is written by different educators hailing from institutions across the United States, as well as a few from the United Kingdom, Australia, and Canada. Because their affiliated institutions range from traditional land-grant state schools to more liberal metropolitan art schools, their pedagogical practices vary and reveal a schism between the different types of fashion programs that exist today. (For example, programs that are intended to train students for standard industry jobs tend to have different priorities from those focused on nurturing the creative passions of the next Alexander McQueen.)
The book is broken down into sections based on general themes, such as fashion merchandising, construction, history, and sustainability. Each chapter includes a different assignment, encouraging the use of different outcomes and modes of learning. The assignment topics vary greatly across the book’s thirty-two chapters, including a “Project Runway Second-Hand Clothing Challenge,” “An Exercise in Reflecting on Daily Dress Practices,” and “Developing Construction and Design Skills through Application of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM).” The range of these assignments make Teaching Fashion Studies an especially helpful resource for faculty who are often asked to teach a wide variety of classes, including subjects that fall outside of their area of expertise or comfort zone. However, the reader may have some uncertainty as to where to begin and might struggle to identify assignments that would best fit their curriculum, which is why a discipline guide (oddly tucked away towards the end of the book) is a helpful place to start.
In the interest of transparency, I must admit that many of the assignments in this book are neither new or surprising, especially if you’ve been in academia for some time. Nevertheless, a few chapters truly did surprise and encourage me to reconsider my teaching approaches. For example, I was inspired Patricia Dillon’s chapter on “The Importance of Understanding the Market Value of Historical Costume” as it wasn’t something that I was taught, even in my graduate courses. The correlating assignment “contributes to the understanding of the discipline and realistically prepares students for success in the twenty-first century,” which makes this chapter particularly useful for those who study fashion history—an area that’s notorious for leading to scant job prospects.
The chapters related to sustainability could serve as valuable resources for teachers who aren’t fully immersed in this subject area, but are still interested in engaging with this critical topic. Alice Payne’s chapter titled “Weighing Up Sustainable Fashion” is notably helpful in building an understanding of the inherent complexity of the many social and environmental issues that are linked to fashion production. The correlating assignment challenges students to assess a company’s “ethical values” using different forms of criteria, empowering them to make more ethical decisions as consumers. June-Ann Greeley’s chapter on “A Systemic Analysis of the Ethics of Fast Fashion Consumerism and A Call to Sustainability” serves a similar purpose, but with an emphasis on fast fashion and formulating positive solutions to unjust and unethical practices by having students explore every stage of the production process, “from seed to shopping bag.”
“Considering how the fashion system undermines and upholds existing hierarchies is a key consideration of Teaching Fashion Studies,” editor Holly M. Kent states in her introductory chapter. “This book’s exercises help students to reflect on how different individuals and groups experience dress in their daily lives, how the fashion economy impacts those who participate and labor in it, and the potential that a global fashion media has to reaffirm (as well as to destabilize) existing ideals about beauty and the body.” While I wouldn’t say that this was true for the entire book, there are some sections that could prove to be valuable resources for those who want to introduce more inclusive fashion pedagogy in their courses but are unsure of where to start.
“But how should one introduce these assignments, navigating the inherent tensions that arise when asking students to acknowledge their personal wealth, privilege, and racial identity? Despite one’s best intentions, I can attest that emotions can run high and unexpected issues can arise whenever students are asked to grapple with their differences. ”
Part Six of the book is dedicated to the overarching theme of “Diversity and Identity,” featuring exercises intended to “enable students to analyze the intersections between race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, age, region, and ability and fashion culture.” It begins with an “Intersectionality Map Assignment” by Anya Kurennaya, which enables students to consider how they use fashion to form their identities while unpacking the different subject positions that affect their daily fashion practices. Elizabeth Stigler’s chapter on “Analyzing Representations of Feminist Aesthetics in Print Media” uses contemporary advertisements to explore the ways that media can reflect complicated issues related to women, feminism, and empowerment. The correlating assignment provokes students to decide what makes something “empowering,” thus leading them to the realization that fashion conveys ambiguous messages that need to be interpreted from different perspectives.
Mel Michelle Lewis’s chapter titled “The Vintage Black Glamour Showcase: Developing Media Literacy and Cultural Competency” also encourages students to question messages disseminated by popular media through an analysis of historical and contemporary depictions of black glamour. The correlating assignment seeks to reveal how these images can be linked to issues concerning diversity, inclusion, and activism, while also questioning the white supremacist and misogynistic narratives that continue to be prevalent within the fashion industry. The last chapter explicitly devoted to “Diversity and Identity” is “Discussing Difference in Students' Fashion Blogs” by editor Holly M. Kent, which encourages students to question homogeneity in the online fashion world and create more diversified content through a class blog, which may seem slightly passé to Gen Z students who came of age after the popularity of fashion blogging had waned.
But how should one introduce these assignments, navigating the inherent tensions that arise when asking students to acknowledge their personal wealth, privilege, and racial identity? Despite one’s best intentions, I can attest that emotions can run high and unexpected issues can arise whenever students are asked to grapple with their differences. Oftentimes teachers aren’t trained to properly navigate these situations, which is why the advice provided within these chapters is particularly valuable.
For example, Mel Michelle Lewis cautions teachers to “discuss historical and culturally specific uses of language and set ground rules for class discussion, such as substituting the “N word” or referring to an author’s use of a term indicating they are not pedestrian, contemporary uses of the term.” Establishing such ground rules for discussing race, especially in predominantly white classrooms, is crucial for being able to discuss difficult topics while ensuring that students are aware of the potential of their language to harm or offend other students. When it comes to discussing race and class, Holly M. Kent warns that, “discussions of these issues can sometimes become fraught (with students sometimes “Othering” the dress practices of those unlike themselves.).” While such warnings can be helpful, this book doesn’t provide much help or detail on how to actually have these preemptive discussions and what one should say. For this reason, proper training and open dialogues with experienced teachers from diverse backgrounds is still a crucial step for preparing oneself to teach fashion studies.
“At the end of the day, it’s important for educators to realize the complexity of teaching fashion studies, and how our teaching approaches can significantly impact our students and the fashion industry at large. ”
In addition to the aforementioned chapters within “Diversity and Identity,” this book provides a number of other chapters that can be used to question white, Eurocentric views of fashion in the classroom. One is Amanda Sikarskie’s chapter on “Thinking About Cultural Appropriation and Indigenous Fashion,” in which students are challenged to look at cultural appropriation from different perspectives and become more mindful of how they approach this issue as both consumers and fashion professionals. Other chapters unexpectedly use history as a lens to explore inequality in fashion, such as Amber M. Chatelain’s “Analyzing the Social Functions of Dress in Different Historical Eras” and Catherine Bradley’s chapter on “Costume in Historical Context,” both of which encourage teachers to foster more diverse views of fashion history and encourage students to do the same in their coursework. “In an effort toward inclusion,” Bradley writes, “images in each era reflect not only the stereotypical archetypes, but also reflect diversity in race, gender, sexual orientation, and class. […] this can take the form of acknowledging the contributions of traditionally overlooked minority figures.” This approach can be applied to many of the other chapters throughout the book, asking student to make a concerted effort to explore and question traditional notions of race and gender through each assignment.
While the variety of assignments will prove useful to faculty teaching across the interdisciplinary field of fashion studies, one could argue that the true value of the book is in the comprehensive bibliographies provided at the end of each chapter, which can be used to obtain readings to assign students to prepare for these assignments. A section dedicated to “cautionary advice for instructors,” which is also included in each chapter, is particularly valuable for those who are teaching these subjects for the first time as they reflect the challenges that each author faced when implementing these assignments in their own classrooms. Being able to learn from other teachers’ missteps is something that is lacking from higher education departments where teachers have little interaction with each other, and yet such little pearls of wisdom are capable of avoiding significant amounts of conflict and confusion.
Teaching Fashion Studies obviously can’t provide all of the resources that teachers need to overcome the numerous challenges that must be faced in higher education. If nothing else, I hope that this book serves as inspiration for more teachers to share their resources and ideas, possibly leading to a second edition filled with more radical teaching approaches or, better yet, an open source database that can be accessed by all educators. At the end of the day, it’s important for educators to realize the complexity of teaching fashion studies, and how our teaching approaches can significantly impact our students and the fashion industry at large. “If fashion education taught about the history of Indigenous genocide, we might not see rampant cultural appropriation,” says Ben Barry. “If fashion education taught about anti-Blackness, we might not see blackface repeatedly make its way to the runways.” While the very concept of fashion can seem inconsequential amongst pandemics and protesting, it’s precisely in these moments of upheaval that we should question how we teach a subject. Within every field, better education is needed in order to move forward.
