Fashion as a domain of aesthetic inquiry: A postmodern assessment of critical writings on fashion in America between 1980 and 1995

The purpose of this research was to gain an understanding of fashion as a domain of aesthetic inquiry by identifying its underlying conceptual basis as outlined in critical fashion writings in art magazines. The notion of "fashion as a domain of aesthetic inquiry" arises from various emerging phenomena in the fashion and art worlds and raises the following questions: Do fashion and art share underlying values and concepts? What kind of common ground exists between the fashion world and the visual artworld? What are the differences between them? With these questions in mind, the researcher identified and analyzed thirty-two critical fashion writings selected from four major American art magazines (Artforum, Art in America, Artnews, and Arts Magazine) between 1980 and 1995 in an attempt to develop a critical theory of fashion as a domain of aesthetic inquiry.; Thomas Munro's metacritical considerations of art criticism and James D. Carney's Style-relative Model of Art Criticism were utilized to analyze the method and underlying concepts of critical fashion writings. Carney's model of art criticism was especially suitable for a postmodern assessment of the writings since it was developed to encompass the diversity of postmodern visual art.; This dissertation contains five chapters. Chapter I contains introductory material. Chapter II is a review of the related literature and deals with the relationship between fashion and art, theories of the domain of aesthetic inquiry, and theories of art criticism. In Chapter III, analyses of fashion writings based on Carney's model and postmodern critical viewpoints are presented, together with a review of postmodern theories of art and an explanation of the method's theoretical background. In Chapter IV, metacritical assessments of the critical fashion writings are developed to determine the similarities and differences between fashion and art, and the foundations for a theory of fashion criticism are proposed, together with a model for fashion criticism.; From the research, the authors' underlying conceptions of fashion were identified and described; based on the findings, the researcher set out a foundation for a theory of fashion criticism as a domain of aesthetic inquiry.