Lehrveranstaltungen Online

Design and Sociability: Performance, Fashion and the Modern Interior

This seminar examines how fashion, furniture, interior design, photographs, and drama all contribute to the writing of personal narratives and how design objects could serve as documents to the art of socializing at the first half of the twentieth century. Modern consumers assumed certain social roles when they purchased dresses and furniture pieces in the fashion salons, carpentry workshops, department-stores or when they hired artist-designers. This seminar further explores the changing of cultural identifications of men and women as well as their social relationships to family, friends, and other potential “viewers,” through their images in photographs and portraits. This seminar addresses questions such as: did consumers merely react to ad campaigns in newspapers, fashion and design journals, were they inspired by shop-windows design, theater shows and movies, or were fashion, interior design and performance linked through critical choices for self-representations and social relationships?  This course includes theories on the relationship between sociology and design such as Georg Simmel’s essays “On the Psychology of Fashion,”  “The Problem of Style,” and “Flirtation,” Walter Benjamin’s “The Arcades Project,” and Piere Bordieu’s “Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste.”