A “chance encounter” between Leigh Bowery—an embodiment of “Fashion Studies In-Between”—and Bill Lieberman, then curator of Contemporary and Modern Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1994.

Francesca Granata, Assistant Professor of Fashion Studies at Parsons the New School for Design has just published the article “Fashion Studies In-Between: A Methodological Case Study and an Inquiry into the Field of Fashion Studies” in the journal Fashion Theory—the leading journal in the field.

The article employs her dissertation “The Bakhtinian Grotesque in Fashion at the Turn of the Twentieth-first Century” as a methodological case studies, and calls for the use of multi-methodological approaches to the study of fashion. The article also assess the state of the field in relation to other “new” or newly emerged fields such as film studies, performance studies, visual culture and material culture and opens up for further discussion the question of whether fashion studies is, in fact, developing into a self-standing discipline/field and what the potential benefits and drawbacks of such a transformation might be.

Image: Photograph by Don Pollard (http://donpollardphoto.com/)