Senior Seminar: Crafting Tradition -Textiles in a Changing World

This class will investigate the negotiations made to bring traditional textile objects and techniques from varying cultures to the contemporary market. In each class, we will examine a traditional, indigenous textile object and technique in terms of production, formal qualities, and cultural context. We will also investigate the work of a contemporary organization or company working to preserve, and in some cases, revive, that particular object or technique. Using this case-studyapproach, different strategies for promoting indigenous textile crafts will be examined, including artisan-run cooperatives, micro-lending situations, fair trade businesses, and other sustainable business models. Each strategy will be analyzed in regards to its “success” in promoting prosperity for the artisans, as well as for its impact on the techniques, skills, and/or visual traditions it seeks to preserve. Students will gain a deeper knowledge of world textile history, and simultaneously delve into issues surrounding cultural preservation, global politics, social entrepreneurship, and sustainable design. We will uncover some of the many complexities that arise alongside the shift to consumption of artisan-produced goods in a globalized society.

MA Fashion Studies: Fashion Practices

What are the premises and paradigms underlying current spectacular fashion practices and how are they constructed? This class will look into notions of capitalism, narcissism, mass production, division of labor, neoliberalism, and consumerism. The course will explore the role of the media and how we currently define our selves and success in relation to the spectacular. We will look at pivotal moments in western fashion history that helped shape and define todays paradigms. Through an exploration of a variety of deeply embedded, more mundane or sacred, social, cultural, historical and traditional practices in relation to dress, we will slowly move away from practices that are exclusively driven by monetary incentives, identifying the premises and values that underlie more integrated relations to dress, identity and community. We will discuss and explore notions such as we, the gift, reciprocity, trust, success, joy and abundance. How can these notions shape more inclusive, integrated, sustainable fashion practices? This class will employ different methodologies including dialogue, experiential learning, ethnographic research, literature review using philosophical theory and texts. The class will result in a written proposal for or/and an exploration of an alternative fashion practice supported with substantial research.

Skill Share: Constructing the social

The ‘social’ is constantly being constructed, capitalist’s principles of exclusion, competition and scarcity, are currently the formative forces structuring our social reality. How can we shift that paradigm? The course will explore models of teaching and learning for empowerment and how skills can be traded and bartered to build, sustain and amplify communities, re-locating agency, supporting values, like respect, abundance, and response-ability. Challenging current notions of success and value, the course sets out to re-value the worth of skills, sharing and collaborative co-creation to make better use of the human capital we have abundantly available to us. One of the tools we will focus on, is clear and effective communication skills. Students will re-examine the history of the Shakers and other craft communities, the journeyman traditions of trades and transferable operational models for training outside the regimes of capitalist education and consumption.

Critical fashion and social justice

Fashion is a phenomenon thriving on social injustice, and where there are few social differences it produces them, harvesting its energy from the frictions of social competition. The course will explore topics from the technologies of the self and cultural identity, global production and consumption, body size and regimes of asceticism, aesthetic apartheid and politics of the dressed body. Specifically the course will juxtapose the struggles of social justice with the injustices amplified by fashion to draw parallels and find new tactics for empowerment through fashion, that is, how fashion can mitigate injustice and produce engagement and craft capabilities, or in other words, making people fashion-able.

to celebrate Pascale (and the knighting of Otto)

LOVE

Wrapping up the Fall 2o11 semester, the Love classes joined forces to put on a wonderous inspired showcase of their heartful projects. Be inspired and fall in love with more pics here !

Come and join the F'11 (Un)Fashion presentation,

the Sophomores will be exhibiting and wearing their best projects.

Saturday December 10th, 6-8pm
338 south 5th street, Brooklyn

Friday night ! Come and join for an inspiring evening

full of beautiful works and projects

from the Juniors and Seniors in the IDC Interfaces: Love class.

Friday, December 9th, 7-9pm,

6 east 16th street

rooms 1103 + 1200

Inclusive Practices Brunch

a big thank yous to all those that made our Inclusive Practices Brunch- whew, what a loving day  !

we enjoyed so many special slideshows and heard so many inspiring words, while sitting on a collage of quilts. The feast made by Athena was truly spectacular (if we ever wondered, now we know what love tastes like)! And the afternoon of workshops had a such a wonderful fluidity, from embroidery with Painted to zine making with Otto to creative cutting with Elisa to spinning with Laura, quilting with Michael- oh, what fun was had!
WAY MORE WARM MEMORIES HERE

join the fun...

             rsvp here:http://inclusivefashionpractices.eventbrite.com/