A detailed outline of my studies. This is an excerpt from the proposal submitted to Duke's Program II committee as part of the application process for self-designed majors.
Abstract
In this program, the commercialization of the fashion industry is explored through a multidisciplinary lens. Fashion plays a unique economic role as it exists at the intersection of art and commerce. This program seeks to examine the various shockwaves of the fashion industrial complex as it impacts social structures, the environment, the economy, and the arts themselves, uncovering various perspectives, from producers to consumers, as well as various other stakeholders in the industry. In order to conduct a full exploration, core courses have been chosen in 14 Duke departments, mainly Art History, Economics, and Visual Media Studies. These are supplemented by coursework at North Carolina State University and a semester abroad at London College of Fashion. Furthermore, it will be completed with an honors thesis paper.
Origin
Growing up, I spent two months each year poring over runway shows, hours browsing online retailers, years serving detention for dress code violations, and the past three years attempting to make sense of it all. At first, I thought it was a simple interest, just pretty clothes and glossy magazines, but the deeper I delved into the fashion world, the more complex things became. Why did brands spend millions on runway shows for clothes they didn’t even sell? Where did my clothes go after I cleaned out my closet and donated them? Why were my teachers so upset at the tank top I thought was cute? While I assumed these would have simple answers, what I discovered was a web of even larger questions, ones of economics, psychology, environmental science, sociology, and more.
So, I fell down the rabbit hole trying to answer these questions. I found that runway shows are primarily a marketing strategy, meant to cultivate a brand image that consumers could recognize even if they couldn’t afford the products. I learned that when I donate my old clothes, a vast majority of them end up in landfills, creating almost 100 million tons of annual waste. I came to understand that my teachers were just products of a society that taught them that women’s bodies were meant to be regulated and commoditized. The more I looked, the more I saw how fashion and clothing interacted with so many different areas of life. However, I also noticed how these connections were largely being ignored in academic settings. Almost everything I was studying at Duke could be tied back to fashion, but few people were talking about it.
As I learned more about economics specifically, I became fascinated by the ways that creative arts in general function in the economy. In its romanticized form, creativity is extolled as a means of emotional expression, monetary value placed as an afterthought. However, the fashion industry fundamentally reverses this order, considering financial gain as it creates. For this reason, I see fashion as the most interesting case study for understanding exactly how creativity and capitalist motives both succeed and fail to coexist. Furthermore, when studying economics, fashion defies many traditional rules and operates more like an art market than one for consumer goods. However, as one of the largest consumer industries (generating more than $3 trillion per year), fashion has managed to weave together a web of influence that touches virtually every other sector. Fashion utilizes its status as a creative art to harness this influence, creating a unique middle ground between accessible consumer goods and elite art objects.
What I hope to achieve in my Program II is to study the nuances of these relationships in an intellectual and complex way. Often, fashion education is framed in a pre-professional light, with numerous programs preparing students for careers in the industry. My aim is different: I would like to study fashion as an academic topic, in a similar manner to the way one might study art history or cultural anthropology. I hope to take full advantage of Duke’s intellectual challenges, while focusing my studies in an area that is atypical. Fashion education can be well-rounded and cross-disciplinary, which I intend to experience with my program.
Learning objectives
My main learning objective for this program is to analyze the role of fashion as a unique actor in the relationship between art and commerce. Furthermore, I seek to explore how this positioning uniquely impacts other aspects of life. To do this, I’ve structured my courses into four primary areas. There is overlap between these categories, but this division is simply a method of organization to make clear how these each relate to fashion and fit into a study of globalization. The areas I’ve chosen to focus on are society, the environment, the economy, and the arts themselves.
First, I hope to study social structures. Examining gender, race, culture, and class, I will gain a greater understanding of how fashion affects and is affected by each of these. Clothing plays a very different role in each social arena, with gender performance, appropriation, cultural influence, and aspirational marketing all inextricably linked to both capitalism and the fashion industry. Considering the ways that each is socially constructed and maintained, fashion as a visual medium plays a significant role in each of these areas. Through this, I seek to explore how fashion shapes these identities and can create both collective identity and social barriers.
Next, I will study the environment, which is also linked to both fashion and capitalism. Understanding the environment from a political and social perspective is crucial to learning how the industry has been able to take advantage of natural resources and how the continuous creation of waste affects different populations, some bearing a greater burden than others. In this module I will explore fashion as a commodity for consumption. As a global industry, fashion plays an important role in structural development but also has the potential for devastating destruction.
Perhaps the largest area which I hope to focus on is the economy. Globalization is crucial to study for understanding the ways that the fashion industry interacts with the global economy. Some of these courses focus on the human burden of industry and what the effects may be on the low-income labor force behind fashion production. The other side of the economy which I hope to examine is the way that fashion itself is a creative industry. Learning about the business of art and how it functions in the market is key to examining fashion as a business of creativity. In this section, I hope to study how art markets differ from traditional ones and how the fashion market draws characteristics from each.
Finally, I hope to study the creative side of fashion and its significance as a visual medium. Studying visual culture and the science of visuality at Duke, I will learn about the ways in which visual imagery influences culture as well as how fashion as a mass-produced commodity differs from other creative areas. Finally, I plan to supplement my Duke explorations with transfer credits from institutions that offer more specific courses to my area of interest. I intend to take advantage of NC State’s fashion program and a semester abroad at London College of Fashion in order to round out my studies.
By studying in each of these areas, I hope to gain both a broad understanding of fashion’s role as a creative commodity and a comprehensive liberal arts education. Looking at fashion’s function in society, the environment, the economy, and visual arts, I believe I may begin to understand the complex ways in which fashion exists at and is formed by the intersection of these topics.
Uniqueness of Study
The primary reason for my pursuing Program II may seem obvious: Duke does not have a fashion program nor any fashion-focused courses. Even with the programs Duke does offer to supplement this, like the Tri-Institutional agreement and abroad programs, none of these would allow me to dive into the concept as deeply as I hope to. These resources are helpful ways to add fashion electives into one’s curriculum, but under Program I, there is no way for me to study fashion and globalization as my primary area of interest.
Similarly, in order to make this my primary focus and perform a full exploration, it’s necessary to mix multiple disciplines in a way that does not constitute a traditional major. While all Trinity programs offer important core courses to each of their respective disciplines, the cross-examination involved in this plan does not leave room to complete the traditional Program I major requirements and simultaneously achieve my academic goals. Furthermore, the idea of mixing disciplines into a combination of majors, minors, and certificates also forces the scope of my program to be limited into two or three disciplines. Because I plan to take courses in at least fourteen different departments, the limits of an interdepartmental major also render this course inviable.
Finally, and most importantly, Duke’s current Program I simply does not offer an exploration into my program’s core questions. In my short time at Duke, I hope to be able to explore my intellectual curiosities to the fullest extent and unfortunately, the options currently offered under Program I do not allow for this. While my area of focus may be unconventional, it is not unintellectual, and I truly believe that it constitutes a legitimate degree program on its own. Again, while Program I may have resources that may be useful to me, abroad programs and electives on their own do not allow me to study this area to the full degree that I think it warrants.
Name Justification
The name I’ve chosen for my program, “Fashion and Globalization: The Creative Commodity,” aims to encapsulate the nature of my studies and main idea. For the first part, the term “globalization” provides a way to describe the global outlook of my program, while also acknowledging the economic phenomena at the heart of the study. Like fashion, globalization as a concept encompasses more than just economics, covering other complex topics like sociology, public policy, and culture. In this way, I see globalization as being similar to how fashion is studied in this program: a means to examine the impacts of economics by adopting a holistic scope. The second half of the title, however, is equally important, pinpointing the precise reason why this topic interests me: the idea of creative arts as a commodity and learning how creative industry functions in a capitalist society. I believe fashion is a ripe case study for this topic, as a creative art that has been transformed into an industrial powerhouse. The heart of my question surrounds fashion’s role as an item for mass production and consumption. By anchoring these ideas in fashion, I hope to gain a unique understanding of arts, economics, and their greater impacts.
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