Hello and welcome to the History of 20th Century Fashion and Beyond. I’m Wendy Goldstein and I’ll be your guide in this study of fashion from historical perspective. The 20th century is a really unique time period, in that there were more silhouette or shape changes more technological advancements in that hundred years than all of history prior. So it’s a really unique time period to study in fashion. So why do I teach this class? well I’ve had a love of fashion all my life it started with high school theater and doing costumes and I did historic costume study in college at The Ohio State University for my undergraduate and master’s degree even did my research on the men’s garment industry and Cincinnati in the 19th century a blip a sentence that i got from an Ohio history class that Cincinnati was the largest producer. Moving on, I went to F&R Lazarus which has become Macy’s and became a buyer there. For the last 36 years I’ve had my own company that manufactures costumes some you may know like Brutus Buckeye Michelin Man Kool-Aid Man. So all of this diverse background gives me a unique perspective to bring to this class. We’re going to look at the cultural and global forces that cause growth and expansion in the fashion industry. We’ll look at Oat Couture and how it came to be. We’ll look at how the United States became dominant as a mass producer of clothing during the war. We’ll even look at the new development fashion today called fast-fashion, we’ll look at itinerant peddlers at the beginning of the century and how they became owners of general stores and then the development of department stores as new technology came onto the scene. All of these things give us a way to look at fashion by looking at developments in technology politics, science, religion, war, economics, and even entertainment like music, theater, dance, and yes, sports even influences fashion. Then we’ll take a look at some of the most important designers and the related businesses that evolved around them and how that influences the growth and expansion of fashion in Europe and the United States. And finally we’ll take a look at how to do primary research in fashion what are the primary sources and you’re very lucky because today you can study collections all around the world like this one at The Ohio State University because it used to be that if you were a fashion historian you needed to travel all around the world to study your area of expertise and now we can all study it online. The focus of this class will be this historicism or understanding what happened in the past and how it influences fashion going forward. I truly hope that I can share some of my passion with you about this field and influence your interpretation of fashion today based on history in the past so let’s get started.
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