Fashion, academically.

I'm a student at a liberal arts school. I spend August through May with the writings of great minds. My freshman year I fell in love with Hobbes and last year introduced me to the wonders of Sartre and Hannah Arendt. My copy of The Second Sex is packed with margin notes, I kind of adore Beckett, and I think that Rousseau was a lazy hippie. The intense curriculum is sort of responsible for my blog. With upwards of 200 pages to read a night, there's little time to browse Style.com or accessorize. While I started the blog as a high schooler, it's become essential to my sanity since starting college. My love for the fashion world needs an outlet and Classic Black Pumps provides that. And I try to incorporate fashion into my studies. I wrote a paper about Communism meaning the ultimate downfall of the fashion industry. My Natural Sciences final essay talked about fashion trends being an accelerated mirror of evolution. It's a little mission of mine to prove to my fellow scholars that fashion has a place in academics. Now, there's already a pretty brilliant list of this nature on the wonderful blog, Academic Chic, but I thought I would make my own version of the list.

-Fashion, Culture, and Identity; by Fred Davis
-The End of Fashion: How Marketing Changed the Clothing Business Forever; by Teri Agins
-The Language of Fashion; by Roland Barthes
-The Fashion System; by Roland Barthes
-Appearance and Identity: Fashioning the Body in Postmodernity; by Llewellyn Negrin
-Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution; by Caroline Weber*
-The Fashion Reader; by Abby Lillethun
-Fugitive Denim: A Moving Story of People and Pants in a Fugitive World; by Rachel Louise Snyder

Fashion isn't just about what looks pretty. It's about history, society, and art. And we style mavens need to be well versed on the subject. Happy reading!

*This book is pretty much the cornerstone of my scholarly forays into fashion. If you only read one, this is it. So good.