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Fashion Visual Cultures is taught across all three years of the Fashion BA at Middlesex. Students engage with critical thinking around fashion history, theory and industry.

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2020 Vision All I want is...

visual cultures

Nature and the Human in Fashion: A Sustainable Relationship? After Charles Darwin's book On the Origin of the Species was published in 1859, there emerged an exciting new trend among fashionable society to discover the natural world. Read more

visual cultures

Representations of Resistance: The Aesthetic of the New Age Movement In my dissertation, I explored the New Age Traveller movement, specifically focusing on the music and arts collective ‘Spiral Tribe’. I also examined the media representation of the movement through popular culture studies and music theorists, as well as fashion theory. Read more

visual cultures

Fashion as a Second Skin: Interactive Fashion ‘Nothing signals the arrival of a new generation so surely as the fact that the previous one is shocked by its influences’. (100 Fashion Designers 10 curators, 2013, p. 4) Read more

visual cultures

Gender Inequality and The Representation of Craft in the Fashion Industry Gender inequality is a concerning problem in the fashion industry. The Design Council’s 2018 report stated that ‘78% of the UK’s design workforce is male’. Moreover, women are less likely than men to be in senior roles, with only ‘17% of design managers being female’ (2018, p. 7). Read more

visual cultures

The Clashes of my Cultural Heritage: How Has French Fashion Appropriated West African Fashion? I examined the relationship between West Africa and France, and argued that Colonialism led to the cultural appropriation of West African fashion by French designers. In one of my chapters, I researched the history of the 1931 Coloniale Exposition in Paris. Read more

visual cultures

Women’s Subjectivity in the Iranian Fashion Industry My research questioned how the complex relations of the body and veil might work to challenge and scrutinise the rules of surveillance and the compulsory hijab in Iran. The compulsory rule of hijab instructs women to veil in order to protect and command the male gaze. Read more

visual cultures

Roller Derby and the Representation of Women During the course of researching my dissertation, I discovered a lack of relevant written or online sources that discussed roller derby in either scholarly texts, or in an everyday context. Read more

visual cultures

Can second-hand influencers on Instagram change our consumption patterns? I started my second-hand influencer page in 2017 to share items I found second-hand. In 2018 I began sharing second-hand outfit pictures, as I began to consume second-hand items for financial reasons, but also for style reasons, to create individual looks. Read more

visual cultures

What is the Approach through which Fashion can help Revive the Malaysian Traditional Arts and Culture? This article comes from a section of my dissertation, where I discuss the process and approach of hybridity and its relationship in fashion, that could help in the revival of Malaysian traditional arts and culture. Read more

visual cultures

Punk: Violent Fashions? The punk movement is an iconic British subculture. However, confusion often surrounds what the punk movement actually meant. Read more

visual cultures

The Misrepresentation of Indian Women in Fashion: Influencers and Empowerment in the Media Women in India are becoming increasingly independent due to progress in society. Many changes can be traced back to British rule in India which, while deeply damaging in some respects, in other ways, women’s rights were improved. Read more

visual cultures

Culture Under Censorship in the USSR: Homogenous Soviet fashion and Desirable Western Trends Up until the 1980s, fashion in Lithuania was rigid and homogenous. While there were some variations for womenswear, menswear offered identical silhouettes and colours with only minor alterations. Read more