Шанинка приглашает на открытую лекцию преподавателей Школы перспективных исследований (SAS) ТюмГУ «Reflections on Fashion and Philosophy» 15 января в 16:00. Лекция пройдет на английском языке

Over the course of a semester professors Xindi Li and Devin Wangert led an experimental seminar called “Fashion and Philosophy.” This talk reflects on the successes and failures not of the seminar itself but of its particular approach and the conception of interdisciplinarity it entails. Namely, “fashion studies” is not a coherent field and lacks a coherent method, nor are Li and Wangert professors of fashion. The hypothesis that ultimately formed the course was therefore based on addressing these two problems in tandem:how does one develop a method of study appropriate to the fashion system? (2) what is the ‘object’ of study when one studies fashion?

“Reflections on Fashion and Philosophy” will be a discussion about the initial solution that Li and Wangert proposed—to start with the concrete techniques and practices of the fashion industry, and to analyze how those techniques and practices are already methods for posing and ‘solving’ philosophical problems. Li and Wangert will focus on three different topics developed in the seminars in order to anchor these reflections, in each case using examples from the fashion industry to demonstrate philosophical problems—here real contradictions—that this industry must address to go about its daily functioning even if it is itself largely agnostic to philosophy. “Historiography” will look at fashion design as a citational practice that must, from historical repetition, produce a new collection. “Self-writing” addresses familiar tropes of fashion as self-expression by highlighting the way in which the self is, in these instances, acutely built upon objects. “Collecting” uses the figure of the fashion collector to analyze ideas of accumulation and finality—if a collection’s coherence is predicated on its finiteness, why is the work of collecting never finished?