Paper instructions:
PLEASE CHOOSE ONE TOPIC FROM

BELOW:

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 Svendsen, 2006: 30.

Discuss how Svendsen’s idea of memory and fashion

relates to Walter Benjamin’s Arcade Project.