(Re)Fashioning the Humanities: Thinking Through Fashion Studies

Susan B. Kaiser
Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies
UC Davis

How can fashion help us understand the humanities? Conversely, how can the humanities further illuminate the already burgeoning and complex field of fashion studies? Given the importance of material culture in many humanities approaches – particularly the idea of expressive culture as it is produced, distributed, and consumed – Bruno Latour’s notion of a “material-semiotic” network is the starting point for the group’s work. As highly interdisciplinary fields in their own right, fashion and the humanities encourage us to engage inter/intra/multi disciplinary scholars across a range of campuses. This group, like its subject matter, was diverse, multivalent, and intersectional, and often interrogated disciplinary approaches. The group met twice on the UCD campus and once at UCI, with additional, ongoing electronic communications, aimed at producing a special edition of a journal or an edited volume.