You are invited to the Global Future Speaker Series latest talk on ‘Fashion as Culture or Fashion as Industry? Yes, Please!’
Date and time: Wednesday 26 February, 17:00 – 19:00
Venue: Guildhall, Winchester
Overview : Given the choice between defining fashion as culture or as an industry, one might quote Groucho Marx’s humorous response to the mundane question ‘Tea or coffee?’: ‘Yes, please’, was his answer. In this way we might escape (rhetorically, at least) the false choice between, on the one hand, a cultural view of fashion as a means of communication, a system of signs, a tool to create a social imaginary, and on the other an economic understanding of fashion as a manufacturing and retailing business only. At the same time, it is too easy to conceptualise the relation between the two poles by just stating that fashion is an expression of culture, maybe a form of art, translated into wearable and marketable items, and it is equally unsatisfying and vague to think of fashion as a system where tangible and intangible features are indissolubly linked. How does the relationship actually happen? To what extent, under which conditions, through which agents and processes does fashion work as a cultural industry?
For more information and a biography of the speaker click here.