Fashion Studies MA students at lunch with “fashion studies heavyweight” Chris Breward. pic: Mattison.

If fashion studies is so far-reaching in its scope, and if we are so diverse in our backgrounds, how can we build an established canon that is neither too scattered nor too limited? Do we risk alienating each other by delving too far into the theories of our respective disciplines, and do we risk oversimplifying the field if we seek too deeply a common ground?

From our perspective, fashion studies is indeed somewhat of a lump sum of our own experiences, encompassing everything that we ourselves are interested in. But it also has emergent properties, and we are charged with the task of establishing the links and connecting the dots between our various academic backgrounds while imbuing Fashion Studies at Parsons with a unique identity.

Fashion Studies and Collaboration

As an inherently interdisciplinary field with a diverse group of practitioners, fashion studies is well suited for a collaborative research approach. Collaborative work gives us the opportunity to inform one another of our academic strengths, and it allows for the type of practical working experience that leads to a more comprehensive, more informed view of the particular topic and of the field in general. This section addresses the advantages and disadvantages of such “interdisciplinarity” and asks how collaboration can be used as an aid to furthering knowledge.

Parsons’ professor Pascale Gatzen discuss theory and practice with Otto von Busch, researcher at the School of Design and Craft, University of Gothenberg, Sweden. pic: Mattison.

To start with, collaborative work capitalizes on the nature of interdisciplinary research by giving us a way to remain rooted within the discipline that we know best, while still giving a nuanced, multifaceted character to the research. We will never be experts on everything, so pooling our knowledge together seems a particularly effective way to bridge the gap and approach a more comprehensive study of a given topic.

As scholars in a new field, a fixed hierarchy of scholarship does not yet bind us. This notion puts us in a unique position to be truly multi-methodological. The flexibility of the field allows us to specialize, and its interdisciplinary character lets us combine those findings with others; we have a certain comfort in being able to apply our respective methodologies and compare the results with others.

The collaborative element of the process involves tracing the common thread that runs through the research—something that has the possibility to be both enriching and enlightening. With respect to establishing a canon, the collaborative approach gives us a measure of freedom to build our own canon in relation to our particular research goals. Such a canon is reflective of our backgrounds and interests but is still helpful to those whose paths diverge. As Francesca Granata (independent curator and editor of Fashion Projects: Journal on Fashion, Art and Visual Culture, New York) pointed out at the symposium, such collaboration allows us to better define our research and potentially opens more funding for further research as we gain recognition within the academic community.

The interdisciplinary nature of the field is also potentially problematic and we must address these problems in order to understand why collaboration is such a helpful approach. As mentioned, we run the risk of misunderstanding or potentially alienating each other because we may or may not share a collective understanding—a sort of “lost in translation” effect liable to occur when so many disciplines are at work. If we are too mired in our own respective fields, we may lack the perspective needed to think about our topic in any other way—the “fashion studies” way.