HMS-603 Fashion, Labor, Justice

3 Credits

This course offers an overview of the political economy of labor in the contemporary fashion industry. We trace the roots and routes of fashion's global commodity chains emphasizing especially their cultural and economic contours. In other words, this course focuses on the structural factors that condition global fashion production and consumption. These include but are not limited to trade and labor policies, capitalism's racial and colonial logics, and the global scale of gender oppression. While issues of social representation are no doubt important in relation to fashion, they're not the concerns of this course. This semester, we will approach fashion not as tools for making and performing identity but as a system of unequal institutional arrangements of labor, trade, and rights that are designed to produce highly asymmetrical social, economic, and environmental outcomes.