Writing on Fashion: The Designers’ View

Western fashion is closely related to the histories of individual fashion designers, but what they said and wrote about themselves and their work has been, to date, largely underexplored in the field of fashion studies. This is one of the central paradoxes of Western fashion, which has built its own history on a figure celebrated by the media, but marginalised academically. Taking into consideration fashion designers’ writings from the 20th and 21st centuries, the paper discusses this historical marginalisation, and explores the current role of designer-based explanations in the field of fashion. Far from being a passive product of advertising, fashion designers’ views contribute to explain how fashion objects embody experiences and become facts. The paper critically examines the role of designers’ stories in negotiating the visibility and invisibility of fashion, taking into account both the process of academisation in fashion design education and the current and increasing demand for opening up the fashion system.