RAPPORT
WWW.RECORDINGACHIEVEMENT.AC.UK
Issue 2 (2015)
Figure 2 Viewing the intellectual tradition of fashion through the lens of Cultural Studies
angles. On encountering a subject a student may
be trying to establish norms and right answers,
when the first are contextual and the second
elusive or multiple. As someone once
paraphrased Rear Admiral Grace Hopper 3 , the
most dangerous phrase in the language is ‘we’ve
always done it this way’: using creative methods
to enable students to acclimatise to ambiguity and
uncertainty is one way of breaking that routine.
One of the things we learn as teachers is how to
marry the unpalatable and the attractive, the
serious and the entertaining, as a means of
keeping student attention focused and class
momentum up. Creativity and play offer two ways
of doing this effectively, but should not be
construed as dumbing down, or what is sneeringly
called “edutainment”.
Continuing with the
example of Cultural and Historical Studies
lecturers at the London College of Fashion invite
first years in their opening seminars to decode
their tutors’ clothing and look. They do so drawing
on Prown’s (1982) material culture theory,
3
formulated for the analysis of objects (later
adapted specifically for fashion by Valerie Steele)
which offers a three-stage framework: description,
deduction, and speculation. Through this process
the observer takes an artefact and unpacks its
meaning from the surface to the deep, considering
the narrative of the process of the artefact and the
theories against which the artefact is read. This is
a playful but serious way of inviting students to
apply the cultural theories and principles as a
means of decoding their tutors’ identity. As
someone who has been on the receiving end of
this analysis I can admit that their deductions were
a mixture of the hilarious, terrifying, astonishingly
accurate, thought-provoking and occasionally offpiste. The exercise also served as an excellent
means of encouraging students to examine why
they had drawn the conclusions they had and to
reflect on their own assumptions underpinning
their analysis
I have deliberately opened with an a discursive,
theoretical and playful approach to understanding
See Scheiber (1987)
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