Magic and Camouflage: Fashion Body Identity course material
Here are the materials to the Fashion Body Identity course, currently running at University of Arts London. Introducing key visual and theoretical treatments of the fashioned body, this course explores the relationships between body, identity and fashion as they materialise across a variety of cultural, visual and aural contexts. It's a course that makes the philosophical personal: it explores who you are, what your body ‘means’ and what your clothes say about you.
This series of lectures is about the relationships between fashion and costume and the wearer. It is about identities and the situated body, situated that is across various social and personal contexts including music and moving image. It is about how we adapt to our changing world as we travel through rural, urban and online communities, inspired by traditional, consumer and celebrity cultures. It is about who we are when we dress to facilitate social roles, like work, and live out fantasy ones, like fandoms.
In addition to the interactive lecture materials, there is the fbi-spy blog - which collates pertinent fresh material, additional readings and exercises - and the fbi-spy archive.
The material presented here ranges from the authentic dress of street subculture to the glam fantasy of Ziggy Stardust, from the silent dress codes of Harold Lloyd to the metal noise of Batman; from the homely innocence of Dorothy (Wizard of Oz) to the degradation of Von Aschenbach (Death in Venice); from the reassuring wizardry of the Twelfth Doctor to the dangerous modernity of Melanie Daniels (Hitchcock's The Birds); from fans-with-tattoos to the Wonder Women cosplayers of ComicCon; from the compliance of gym-toned boy band branding to the cultural celebration of body difference, via Beth Dito.
