90988 - Aesthetics of Fashion

Academic Year 2022/2023

  • Teaching Mode: Traditional lectures
  • Campus: Rimini
  • Corso: Second cycle degree programme (LM) in Fashion Studies (cod. 9067)

Learning outcomes

At the end of the course the student is able to critically reflect on the intertwining between cultural, creative and production processes typical of fashion, also by comparing it with the fields of art and design. He/she is able to examine and interpret the structures of aesthetic experience linked to taste practices and the constitution of everyday life-spaces. He/she can contextualize fashion in contemporary culture and can carry out analyses on communication mediated by aesthetic symbolic forms.

Course contents

Title. Fashion, Pop Culture and Metaphysics.

The lecture course will investigate, from an aesthetic point of view, the complex relations between the "logic" of pop culture and fashion, and the meaning and aims of metaphysics, suggesting that pop culture and fashion embody what we may call a post-metaphysical sensitivity and way of life.

Readings/Bibliography

Title. Fashion, Pop Culture and Metaphysics.

 

Lars Svendsen, Fashion: A Philosophy, Reaktion Books 2006, only chapters 1, 2, 4, 6, 7, 8.

 

E. Wilson. Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity, Tauris & Co., London-New York 2003, only Chapters 1, 3 and 8.

 

Stefano Marino, Philosophical Accounts of Fashion in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Century: A Historical Reconstruction, in G. Matteucci and S. Marino (eds.), PHILOSOPHICAL PERSPECTIVES ON FASHION, Bloomsbury, London 2017, pp. 11-45.

 

Stefano Marino, Fashion and Anti-Fashion: A Dialectical Approach, in "THE CULTURE, FASHION, AND SOCIETY NOTEBOOK 2018", Milano-Torino, Bruno Mondadori-Pearson, 2018, pp. 1-29.


Stefano Marino, Body, World and Dress: Phenomenological and Somaesthetic Observations on Fashion, in “Meta: Research in Hermeneutics, Phenomenology, and Practical Philosophy”, vol. 12, n. 1, 2020, pp. 27-48.

 

Stefano Marino, Fashion, Pop Music and Post-Metaphysical Culture, inThe Culture, Fashion, and Society Notebook 2021”, Bruno Mondadori/Pearson, Milano 2021.

 

The bibliography may be subject to changes until the beginning of the lecture course.

Teaching methods

Traditional lectures and class discussions with students.

Assessment methods

The assessment method is written.

The students will write a paper on the texts in the program of this lecture course, and send the paper to the teacher as email attachment (Word or Pdf) at least 15 days before the day of the oral exam published on AlmaEsami.

The paper must be written using Times New Roman 12, and must be long 20.000 characters max. (blank spaces included).

The assessment method is written: students will write a paper on the texts in the program of this lecture course.

Students must read and study all the texts in the Program (not just one essay; all texts must be read, as usually happens in every Lecture Course at the University). Students can select the topics from the various texts that are more interesting for them, and can choose to focus their paper on those topics. The paper must not be necessarily centered on every chapter of every text in the Program, but it is important that the teacher can understand from the paper the student's level of knowlegde of the Program (as also happens in oral exams, for example, where the teacher may typically ask the student various questions on different texts in the Program, to try to understand the student's level of knowledge and understanding of the whole Program, and not just of a single text). If a student wants to choose a case study and use it as a starting point to write his/her paper, this is, in principle, also acceptable (so that students, if they want, may also use their phantasy or use examples taken from their experiences with fashion, music, art, etc.), but it is important that students don't write their paper only on the event or phenomenon that they have freely chosen, but rather use it as an example to apply the concepts presented in the texts in the Program.

 

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The examination will ensure the achievement of the following objectives:

- knowledge of the main conceptual contents of the texts examined;

- general orientation concerning the characteristics of contemporary aesthetic culture;

- comprehension of the affinities and differences between heterogeneous philosophical approaches to popular culture;

- comprehension of the meaning of the concepts learned in relation to the concrete phenomena taken into account.

Teaching tools

The lessons will be supported by the multimedia material available in the classroom.

Office hours

See the website of Stefano Marino