renate stauss

Abstract This article introduces the little-known therapeutic approach of “Therapy of Fashion.” Piloted with a group of female psychiatric patients at Napa State Hospital in California in 1959 and initially carried out as a volunteer project by The Fashion Group of San Francisco, it was practiced in several US-American cities throughout the 1960s. By drawing on a Foucauldian analytical framework, this article analyses how dress and fashion, in the context of “Therapy of Fashion,” were constructed as a normalizing “technology of the self,” as a way of transforming, improving and, effectively, normalizing the bodies and minds of patients. It argues that this therapeutic approach in its official aim of “recreating healthy feminine characteristics” intended to make female patients pass as women, and pass as normative with regards to their gender roles, social behavior and appearance. Moreover, this article maintains that the contemporary relevance of “Therapy of Fashion” lies in the fact that it was developed at a time, at the turn of the 1960s, when in North America and Western Europe both therapy and fashion initially became key coordinates said to define our experience and understanding of ourselves. In its analysis, this article draws on a wide variety of sources: medical journals, local newspapers, contemporary publications about gender and mental hospitals, advertisements for psychotropic drugs and institutional garments, an author interview with one of the participating volunteers, and photographic documentation of different sessions.

Doubt has been part of the fashion discourse for centuries. Fashion has been challenged, ridiculed, and condemned by its many commentators and analysts. But does the Fashion Industry doubt itself? In how far do industry insiders question the system they’re a part of?
What follows is an archive of designer doubt, an excavation and juxtaposition of words and works – an impossible, timely interview about professional self-doubt, doubting the profession and the System of Fashion, about fashion as a questioning act, about verbal and material interrogation, about doubt, despair and hope in Fashion.

This interview-article is a commentary on some of the early reverberations of Covid-19 on the fashion industry. It introduces R.i.(a)P., a work by fashion designer and professor Wowo Kraus to pull focus on some of the immediate industry reactions, and the underlying ambiguity of fashion, branding and death. Fashion evades death, just as death continues to be tabooed in global Western culture. Through its evocative aesthetic and materiality R.i.(a)P. can illuminate some of the blind spots of this industry. Here Kraus talks about the ideas and intricate making processes behind his work.

This article introduces the little-known therapeutic approach of “Therapy of Fashion”. Piloted with a group of female psychiatric patients at Napa State Hospital in California in 1959 and initially carried out as a volunteer project by The Fashion Group of San Francisco, it was practiced in several US-American cities throughout the 1960s. By drawing on a Foucauldian analytical framework, this article analyses how dress and fashion, in the context of “Therapy of Fashion”, were constructed as a normalizing ‘technology of the self’, as a way of transforming, improving and, effectively, normalizing the bodies and minds of patients. It argues that this therapeutic approach in its official aim of ‘recreating healthy feminine characteristics’ intended to make female patients pass as women, and pass as normative with regards to their gender roles, social behavior and appearance. Moreover, this article maintains that the contemporary relevance of “Therapy of Fashion” lies in the fact that it was developed at a time, at the turn of the 1960s, when in North America and Western Europe both therapy and fashion initially became key coordinates said to define our experience and understanding of ourselves. 
In its analysis, this article draws on a wide variety of sources: medical journals, local newspapers, contemporary publications about gender and mental hospitals, advertisements for psychotropic drugs and institutional garments, an author interview with one of the participating volunteers, and photographic documentation of different sessions.

This paper explores the role of the mirror in the act of getting dressed. It argues that in daily practices of dress/ing the predominance of the sense of sight in defining the experience of both dress and our self is materialized and enhanced by the omnipresence of an object: the mirror. Despite being mostly ignored in analyses of dressed body, the mirror performs a crucial role in defining both dress and the self in visual terms. By considering how the mirror is implicated in processes of subjectification , we analyse how this affects the relationship people have with clothes as signifiers of their selves. We maintain that in order to escape the gaze and its solidifying effect, we need to look away from the mirror and think of the body not as a subject, but as a fluid composition of forces. By drawing insights from phenomenology and then adhering to the Spinozian philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari, we interrogate the body as something that affectively transforms in the encounter with clothes to then explore it as a site of becoming with and through clothes. It is our aim to offer an experimentation in thinking that might lead to different ways of experiencing our clothes in the everyday as well as of theorising about their relationship with the human body and the wearers’ (supposed) identity.

Fashion education has expanded greatly in recent years, but has received little formalised pedagogical reflection or analytical attention. This article provides an overview of its current dimensions, contexts and challenges. The starting point is a research and development project that aims to contribute to its reorientation through stocktaking, reflection and networking. There is an urgent need for reform in fashion education. At the same time, fashion and its education have an inherent potential that is worth reassessing and mobilising.

Fashion is not the favourite child of capitalism.
Fashion is not a mirror of society.
Fashion is not a product.

Fashion favours financial capital and socio-cultural capital over human and natural capital. It privileges symbolic capital, the non-tangible. As a result, fashion is mediated in reductive and glamourized ways.
This article maintains that we have a disordered perception of fashion. It takes three dominant views of fashion, three pervasive claims made in relation to fashion and counters them, complicates them, makes them messy. While the article seeks a fuller understanding of fashion in relation to diverse forms of capital, it also aims for an ambiguity in the perception of fashion. The ability to love and hate fashion, to fault and praise it, to see its destructive and creative potential – at once. To hold contradictory ideas about fashion in our minds and act on them without having to resolve them.

Education holds the potential to reinforce systems and to revolutionise them.
Fashion education has served and fed the current global fashion system.
It has also inspired and driven change in the global fashion system.

What kinds of fashion education are needed NOW?

The Multilogue on Fashion Education 2021 was a participatory and outcome-oriented space focused on the learning and teaching of fashion at tertiary level. It explored and illustrated the diversity and complexity of the field and the practices of fashion education. It aimed to foster a greater understanding of its pasts, presents and futures – methods, values and didactic, pedagogic and epistemological questions. This conference inspired mutual learning, collaborative research and shared action – fashion educations for NOW.

The Multilogue on Fashion Education 2021 featured: 32 Papers, 26 Workshops, 3 Provocations, a Conversation, a Student Think Tank and Exhibition, a live Podcasting Booth, a ollaboration with Granary 1, and the launch of FashionSEEDS.

How and why do we learn and teach fashion in times of a global health crisis, in times of social, environmental and democratic crises?
The didactic and pedagogic questions, the pragmatic and philosophical questions we are asking ourselves as fashion educators have changed significantly in recent months. What questions and challenges do we share? What experience and solutions can we share and develop together?
While The Fashion Education Conference had to be postponed until 1–2 October 2021, we want to come together for a Digital Multilogue on Fashion Education on Friday, 25th September 2020 (3–6.30pm CEST) to explore, share and collaborate. This free & open-access event will include:
• short provocations by the members of the conference advisory board
• a panel discussion on learning and teaching fashion online
• a series of 90–minute interactive workshops with a maximum of 8 participants each (free, registration required) each led by two fashion educators or intermediaries from different educational, disciplinary or cultural contexts (“Between” workshops to open up a space of exchange and collaboration).
• a virtual exhibition of student work
The Digital Multilogue on Fashion Education will provide a platform for an essential exchange, a space to get inspired and to deepen our connections, conversations and collaborations.

Fashion is a great teacher because it provides a fantastic lens to learn about the world and its people, about history, politics and culture. Join Renate Stauss and Franziska Schreiber, professors of fashion theory and fashion design in Paris and Berlin to discover inspiring voices in and around fashion education, their take on the how and why of learning and teaching fashion, their doubts and hopes, their lessons from fashion.