Fashion and Politics: national and transnational aspects

Abstract

The presentation investigates the complex relationship between fashion, politics and modernity, both historically and today. Modernity’s, and fashion’s, spread worldwide has been tied up with the controversial advance of western capitalism, including the economic and cultural subjugation of less developed regions and brutal colonial conquests. Yet, while accompanying the global march of capitalism, fashion has mapped the uneven progress of modernity, thus highlighting – and often resisting – the totalitarian, nationalistic and extreme religious spaces on the world map, and, consequently, enabling the cultural re-articulation of new and old hegemonies. 

About the speaker

Dr Djurdja Bartlett is Reader in Histories and Cultures of Fashion at the London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London. Her books comprise FashionEast: the Spectre That Haunted Socialism (MIT Press, 2010), and Fashion and Politics (Yale University Press, 2019). Bartlett’s new monograph European Fashion Histories: Style, Society and Politics (Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2021) has been funded by an Arts and Humanities Research Council Fellowship grant. At LCF, Bartlett is the Coordinator of the Transnational Fashion Hub. She is also the member of a cross-disciplinary research centre for Transnational Art, Identity and Nation (TrAIN), UAL).  

Image Caption:  Model Veruschka as Chairman Mao, French Vogue, guest editor Salvador Dalí, December 1971. Courtesy of the photographer Alex Chatelain