contemporary fashion designers

Essay Titles:
1. Discuss the work of a contemporary fashion designer whose work
reflects an engagement with the world of avant-garde art or culture. Do their designs reflect a utopian impulse, or not?

2. “Dietrich’s things were more than fashion – they were super fashion” said costume designer, Edith Head. Discuss the role of fashion in creating the star persona of Hollywood

actresses/actors, using between one and three stars as examples.

3. “What pulls clothes away from functionalism and the utility principle is the secret desire of most men and women for a life of love and leisure, that is a life only obtainable by wealth and/or

social status” James Laver. Discuss the quotation in relation to the utopian promise of many Hollywood films and how this is revealed through the lifestyle of characters and the stars who play

them, particularly in regard to film design and costume.

4. “What we wished to express in art was the universal and the permanent and to throw to the dogs the vacillating and the fashionable” Aamadee Ozenfant: Foundations in Modern Art: 1931.

Discuss if the modern movement (Adolf Loos and Le Corbusier) achieved its aim to create the purely modern by resisting the pitfalls of fashion.

5. Discuss the importance of the corset in relation to the feminine ideal and the failure of Victorian dress reform.

6. “Fashion exists in an interaction between forgetting and remembering, in which it still remembers its past by recycling it, but at the same time forgets that the past is exactly that.” Lars