1 Fashion System - Introduction, Dress, Fashion, and Luxury

A set of vocabulary flashcards based on lecture notes detailing key concepts, definitions, etymologies, and theoretical foundations of dress, fashion, and luxury.

Dress

A medium that links the biological body to the social being and public to private, treating the human body as an organism in culture whose boundaries extend beyond the skin to hair, nails, and bodily decorative arts.

Primary Functions of Clothing

Protection (most widespread against the cold) and modesty, alongside complex social and expressive functions.

Fashion

A social process and cultural system through which new styles accepted by the public are created, characterised by rapid changing of styles where aesthetics and symbolic meanings predominate over functional benefits.

Mos

A Latin root associated with 'moda', meaning custom, habit, tradition, law, rule, norm, good manners, or morality.

Modus

A Latin root associated with 'moda', meaning unit of measure, extent, moderation, limit, norm, way, or manner.

Façon

The French root of the word 'fashion', meaning manner, way of acting or taking action, or workmanship.

Luxury

An expensive, hard-to-obtain, and extravagant indulgence that is timeless, grounded in the past, and targets one or few market segments defined by price.

Luxus

The Latin root for 'luxury', meaning excess, lack of restraint, splendour, extravagance, or dissipation.

Eurocentric Paradigm of Fashion

The traditional theoretical view claiming fashion originated around 1350 in Western European courts, which dismissed non-Western dress practices as static 'non-fashion'.

Modernist Irony

Elizabeth Wilson's concept describing fashion as a flexible aesthetic medium that parodies itself, elevating the ephemeral to cult status while mocking moral pretensions of dominant culture.

Venus of the Rags

A 1967/1974 artwork by Michelangelo Pistoletto that visually explores the juxtaposition and relationship between classical sculpture and discarded clothing.

Fashion Theory

An academic journal launched in 1997 by Valerie Steele, subtitled 'The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture', which established fashion as a subject worthy of critical academic study.

Course Workload (4 ECTS)

A total commitment of 100 study hours (calculated at 25 hours per 1 ECTS), comprising 24 scheduled class lecture hours and 76 individual study hours.