Art and Design Commons^™

The Liberatory Potential Of Fashion, David Billie Suoth

Honors Theses and Capstones

Fashion has the potential to be liberatory and this can be seen in the ways fashion has been targeted by systems of oppression. Fashion is the use of clothes as a vessel to create a greater social meaning. According to Edward Sapir, the meaning of fashion “while it is primarily applied to dress and the exhibition of the human body is not essentially concerned with the fact of dress or ornament, but with its symbolism” (Barnard, 2007, p. 65). Fashion with the symbolism behind it is able to show the sentiments and attitudes of civilization at different points in history …

The Clothing Left Behind: A Collection Of Stories, Grace Coleman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Beyond its material use, clothing can have powerful emotional effects such as easing grief from personal loss or serving as a memory recall aid for individuals with dementia. It was during my graduate program that I became interested in exploring the idea that clothing can be powerful beyond its aesthetic. Peter Stallybrass’s essay Worn Worlds: Clothes, Mourning and the Life of Things highlighting clothing’s ability to evoke memories and emotions was influential in setting me on my path to research clothing’s connection to memories. Whether it was embodied identity, grief, dementia, mourning rituals, or collective mourning, I was looking at …

Beautiful People: The Past, Present, And Future Of The Fashion Industry's Thin Ideal, Shane White

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Negative body image among women has become an extremely relevant topic in the last decade. The “ideal” female body image and what a person should look like according to marketing and advertising has become a highly controversial issue. This project seeks to show how the fashion industry has, over centuries, shaped how people think they need to look and in today’s time and show how it has been a root cause of issues like body image complexes leading to negative self-perception, eating disorders, mental illnesses like anxiety, depression and addiction, and even suicide. Over the last three to four decades, …

Wafuku: An Exploration Of Historic Japanese Apparel And The Future Of The Kimono Form, Elaina M. Reck

Senior Theses

This thesis is an exploration of historical Japanese dress for women, especially focusing on the kimono. It will delve into the comparisons between Western and Japanese dress (respectively yōfuku and wafuku), especially focusing on form and silhouette. It will conclude with an examination of the current status of the kimono, what led to its demise, but also what recent revitalization efforts have been made in Japan. The companion creative portion is a collection of modern clothing that is inspired by elements of these historic garments, showing that these design elements are timeless. I desire for this project to be …

Getting Dressed And Being Dressed: A Constructed Autobiography Of Identity, Jana Jarosz

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This written and visual capstone project examines how feminist theories surrounding the construction of a gendered subject are related and situational to the narrative of a lived body experience within a layered context of clothing. It opens up a discussion concerning the negotiated space between an individually-empowered, subject-in-process and the boundaries of social expectations outlining gender and cultural identities. The thesis introduces the concept of using an automediality framework to connect the material culture of clothing to still and motion imagery with text as a way to encapsulate and illustrate the fluid nature of becoming. It concludes by suggesting that …

C Reverse For Care, José Luis Chardiet

Senior Projects Spring 2016

José Chardiet

April 2016

C Reverse for Care is organized in a five part care cycle: Wash, Rinse, Spin, Dry, and Wear. The piece is a study in reversibility. It is an effort to learn, to understand what it means to care, and an effort to try to achieve reciprocal balance in any relationship, whether it is with a family member, a partner, or a friend.

The staging is designed for circular movement, suggesting a cycle that is repeated after completion. The spacial structure of the piece is based on the shape of the white ginger lily, the national flower …

A Study Of The Symbolic Clothing Disposition Behaviors Of Generation Y, Patti A. Borrello

Masters Theses

This qualitative study explored symbolic clothing disposition behaviors of Generation Y. The disposition of their wedding gowns was investigated using material possession attachment concepts. The study explored the following research questions: (1) What did Generation Y wedding gown owners do with their wedding gowns after the wedding?, (2) What disposition method was used and why the disposition method was chosen?, and (3) How is attachment to a wedding gowns related to the disposition method selected? Subjects were recruited using a non-probability, chain referral or snowball purposive approach. Within the broad categories of keeping and disposing of, many of the specific …

Clothing Construction, Jill Starnes

Honors Theses

For my honors project I chose to make a pantsuit. However, since it would be rather difficult to file a pantsuit I will try to write down for the honors project file a description of this project and why I chose this particular one.

Psychological Aspects Of Clothing, Marty Mcdonald

Honors Theses

This research was conducted with no established set of hypotheses as guidelines. It was done to point out certain attitudes about clothing and inadvertently, how consciously or unconsciously, ideas are formed about dress.

A questionnaire was prepared for the study. It required the subject to give his age, sex, and classification, but no name. The questions were designed to include some specific topics on female dress and some on male dress, with additional topics related to neither sex expressly. These questions were given to forty subjects, twenty males and twenty females.