Dress thinking: disciplines and indisciplinarity

Abstract

Why is the study of dress history so often encountered, investigated and understood as one half of an equation? The use of the ubiquitous and has become a dominant feature of the landscape of dress history, and indeed of dress studies and fashion theory. It is as if dress history is doomed to a partial existence in constant need of an additional field of study or context in order for it to assert its credibility. While dress history and studies revels in its self-perception as interdisciplinary, promising its students exciting excursions into alternative theoretical territories, it often as not comes as a poor relation to the table, invoking more ‘well-connected’ cousins such as anthropology, economics or psychology. [... ...]

This chapter will suggest that in order for the field to develop and remain challenging, a similar debate needs to take place to that which has recently occurred concerning the relations among art, craft and design. The discrete territories implied by these terms have been explored, and the status of each tested by considering the impact of new technologies on our understanding of ‘making’. [... ...] If interdisciplinarity is to mean anything it must count for more than the ceaseless search for the next fashionable alliance, and allow us to realize the potential of the inter of interdisciplinarity and situate dress history among, and at the centre of, critical enquiry rather than on one side forever fighting for its ascendancy.

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