Subject Area: Women's and Gender Studies
This course can also be studied in the following specialisation: History

This course will focus on the many meanings of dress from daily attire, national dress, and religious costume, to high fashion across a wide gamut of cultures. Specific topics include gender and identity, inventing national dress, deportment, dress as concealment and adornment, shaping the body (such as footbinding and the corset), haute couture, and the politics of dress. The relationships between concealment and etiquette, cloth holiness and magic, dress and undress, and the manipulation of costume for political agendas will also be explored. Case studies will be taken from world history, particularly Europe, Asia and Latin America, over the last four hundred years.