Style Discourse: Fashion, Art, and Culture is a response to the broadening of cultural discourse regarding the crossovers between art, fashion, and popular culture. Its premise is that there has been a major shift in play, noticeable since the new millennium, in which the high-low divide of culture has all but broken down. Instead, we find that the “culture industry”, formerly deemed the organ of deception of capitalist consumption, is now a rich haven for discourse and critique. Fashion has a key role to play in this argument. With rare exception, until recently fashion items were relegated to the retail store and the museum, whereas now they are considered valuable components to art collections. With certain fashion has increasingly a critical function once relegated to art, art too is undergoing changes, especially the art that wishes to dissociate from the proclivity toward entertainment that has become the norm for the last 30 years. In short, this series is devoted to documenting the dynamic shifts in aesthetic and material cultures that have developed with extraordinary speed, and which call for new criteria of analysis.
