Understanding Fashion: From Business to Culture
Discover the business of fashion and understand the cultural impact of the fashion industry with Institut Français de la Mode.
- Duration4 weeks
- Weekly study3 hours
- 100% onlineTry this course for free
Understanding Fashion: From Business to Culture
Step into the fashion world and study fashion and culture with Chanel and YSL
Curious about how the fashion industry has transformed and shaped Western culture over the last 150 years?
This 4-week course delves into the fashion world and investigates fashion as both a cultural phenomenon and a creative industry.
You’ll explore the interaction between fashion, society and business with top fashion designers and professors from Institut Français de la Mode.
Explore the emergence of fashion trends
Where does fashion actually come from? You’ll start the course by answering this question and learning about modern fashion and its contemporary relevance.
You’ll explore the rise of the fashion industry during the industrial revolution and evaluate how brands inject modernity into their designs. The course features case studies from top fashion designers such as Chanel and Gucci.
Investigate the role of fashion designers and brands
You’ll be thinking about the relationship between fashion and politics, and asking whether fashion designers and brands have the power to be social actors.
You’ll also explore fashion code and the language of fashion, considering whether fashion brands are creative languages.
Understand consumption in the fashion industry
In your final week, you’ll investigate fashion consumption and develop your understanding of how it works as a social marker and identity construct.
You’ll evaluate what it takes to create and develop a fashion collection, and you’ll look at the intersections between trends, seasonality and innovation.
Syllabus
Week 1
Fashion and the rise of modern culture
Getting started
Welcome to the course!
Fashion and modernity: the new as principle
How did fashion come into being?
Three conceptions of modernity
What are the three ways of being modern?
Case study: brands and ways to be modern
What are the three fashion models of novelty? Let's study some examples!
Test Yourself
What did you learn that first week?
Week 2
Fashion and society
Fashion as a social distinction mechanism?
Where does fashion originate from?
The functioning logics of the fashion field
What are the logics of the fashion field?
The subcultural clothing: a bottom-up model?
What is the bottom-up model?
Case study: fashion brands as social actors
Can fashion brands really be social actors?
Test yourself
What did you learn that second week?
Week 3
Fashion as a language
The fashion code
Is fashion really a language? Let's compare it to communication models!
Can fashion creation speak?
If fashion cannot be considered as a language, but only as a "code", can it at least be meaningful?
How to read a silhouette?
What is the method for reading a silhouette?
Test Yourself
What did you learn that third week?
Week 4
Fashion, production and consumption
Fashion as an industry
What are the specificities of the fashion industry?
Fashion as consumption
How to explain fashion consumption?
Case study: explaining attempts of the purchase of the little black dress
How to explain a buying behaviour?
Alternative consumption, counter-cultures and counter-hegemonic bricolage
How to define counter-cultural consumption?
General conclusion
What did you learn this fourth week?
When would you like to start?
Start straight away and learn at your own pace. If the course hasn’t started yet you’ll see the future date listed below.
Available now
What will you achieve?
By the end of the course, you‘ll be able to...
- Develop transdisciplinary knowledge and expertise aimed at understanding the logics of the contemporary fashion field
- Identify the creative models of the different fashion houses and their conception of time
- Explore the trends diffusion models
- Interpret a fashion silhouette
- Explain the construction of consumer behaviour
Who is the course for?
Whether you’re a marketing student intrigued by consumer culture or you’re an experienced fashion professional looking to enhance your knowledge, this course is designed for anyone looking to deepen and specialise their knowledge of the fashion industry.
This course will also be relevant to fashion entrepreneurs who need a holistic view of the industry’s key success factors.
This course is supported by DEFI.
Who will you learn with?
I am a permanent professor at Institut Français de la Mode, where I teach fashion theory and fashion brands strategy. My background is in analytic philosophy and social sciences.
Who developed the course?
Institut Français de la Mode (IFM)
IFM (Institut Français de la Mode) is a higher education institution specialising in the textile, fashion, luxury and design industries, based in Paris, France.
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