Critical Theory to Help You Intellectualize Fashion Month and Your Closet
“the best critical theory books on fashion”
In her diaries, Virginia Woolf wrote that “people have any number of states of consciousness: & I should like to investigate the party consciousness, the frock consciousness, etc.” Fashion month always provides a new opportunity to consider this frock consciousness — those states of being prompted by the clothes we wear, the interaction between our private selves and the public world that clothes mediate, and the interrelation between what we wear and how we feel.
Getting dressed enmeshes us in a complex network of associations and social codes, communicating something about us to the world and influencing the way we interact with it. We asked several of the most thoughtful dressers we know — Rebecca Ariel Porte, core faculty member at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research where she teaches the philosophy of fashion (passerbyclub partners receive a 20% discount on BISR classes); Anna Z. Gray, owner of Club Vintage; Monica L. Miller, Barnard Professor and author of Slaves to Fashion; and Anja Aronowsky Cronberg, Editor-in-Chief of Vestoj — about the books they turn to for help in thinking through these questions. Their recommendations range from classics of critical theory to works of “embodied critical theory” on fashion.
The Arcades Projects by Walter Benjamin
recommended by Rebecca Ariel Porte
Benjamin’s fragmentary final work — begun in France in 1927 and unfinished when he died fleeing the German occupation in 1940 — uses the shopping arcades of 19th-century Paris as a lens through which to consider what Benjamin called “the commodification of things.” Convolute B in The Arcades Project deals specifically with fashion. Rebecca Ariel Porte recommends “Benjamin's dreamlike switchbacks in Convolute B, which are more suggestive than definitive, but open up foundational questions about the deathliness of capital and fashion alike.”
Dressed: A Philosophy of Clothes by Shahidah Bari
recommended by Rebecca Ariel Porte
In this book Bari considers everything from Marx’s coat to Madonna’s costumes, providing a thoughtful investigation of how we come to know our own and others’ minds through what we wear. According to Porte, Bari is “really interested in the sensuous and identitarian facets of dress and fashion's haunting/haunted qualities.”
Thinking Through Fashion edited by Agnès Rocamora and Anneke Smelik
recommended by Anna Z. Gray
With chapters on Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Roland Barthes, Judith Butler, and more, each written by a noted expert, this anthology provides an essential resource on major ideas about fashion and an indispensable guide for anyone who wants to understand what fashion means. Gray notes that this anthology “reconsiders the heavyweight philosophers' work through the lens of fashion and consumerism. Helpful for noobs and academics alike.”
Dressed in Dreams by Tanisha Ford
recommended by Monica L. Miller
Monica L. Miller calls this book a work of “embodied critical theory on fashion.” Miller loves this book “because it is intimate and personal but also a powerful statement for the ways in which Black people use fashion, dress, and style to represent their aspirations and challenges. Every word of this book rings true.”
Fashion: A Philosophy by Lars Svendsen
recommended by Rebecca Ariel Porte
In this philosophical consideration of fashion, its history, and its ideas, “Svendsen,” according to Porte, “does some very useful work with the concept of fashion itself (what do we really mean by that word and why has it proven a problematic topic for philosophers?).”
Adorned in Dreams by Elizabeth Wilson
recommended by Rebecca Ariel Porte and Anja Aronowsky Cronberg
“The serious study of fashion has repeatedly had to justify itself,” Wilson — who clearly loves both fashion and the study of it — writes in the introduction to this book. Adorned in Dreams is surely capable of convincing those who need that justification, but its exploration of fashion and modernity has just as much to offer those who always understood that fashion is grounds for serious thought. Porte admires Wilson’s “capacious and ambitious interest in critical theory and gender.” Anja Aronowsky Cronberg calls this book “a classic!”
Slaves to Fashion by Monica L. Miller
recommended by Rebecca Ariel Porte
In this history of the Black dandy, from 18th-Century slaves to Sean Combs and Andre 3000, Miller examines the dandy’s subtle subversion of social codes and the deployment of fashion as a means of critique. Miller argues that the dandy, rather than being a frivolous figure, uses sartorial self-fashioning as a way of negotiating social possibility.
Remote Control by Barbara Kruger
recommended by Anna Z. Gray
This collection of Kruger’s reviews and essays on film, television, and image is — like Kruger’s recognizable work as an artist — clever, concise, and incisive. Gray acknowledges that this is “not exactly a fashion book” but it is a book that “asks us to recontextualize the nonstop barrage of advertising we're fed everyday,” and is thus a crucial companion for thinking through fashion. It is a book that, according to Gray, helps “zoom out and reconsider the way we're sold things which, of course, informs why we buy things.”
Quicksand by Nella Larsen
recommended by Monica L. Miller
Another example of Miller’s “embodied critical theory,” Nella Larsen’s first novel is, of course, “not a traditional piece of ‘fashion’ criticism, but is full of moments in which fashion and representation matter intensely for the protagonist Helga. The book charts her journey from dressing herself to being dressed, so to speak. This loss of agency (Larsen wants us to consider if it is her own doing or that of a racist society) is her undoing.”
If you want to read more about fashion, try Worn: A People's History of Clothing by Sofi Thanhauser (recommended by Rebecca Ariel Porte), Fashionopolis by Dana Thomas (recommended by Lindsey Tramuta), Fashion and Postcolonial Critique edited by Elke Gaugele and Monica Titton (recommended by Céline Semaan), Scruples by Judith Krantz (recommended by Laura Helms), Fashion Today by Colin McDowell (recommended by Nilea Alexander), Women in Clothes by Shelia Heti, Heidi Julavitz, and Leanne Shapton (recommended by Angie Venezia and Kaye Blegvad), and The Beautiful Fall by Alicia Drake (recommended by Glynn Connolly).
Words by meghan racklin