#  EASTD 154 - Threads: Histories and Theories of Clothing and Fashion 

 





 Semester:   Fall 

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 Year offered:  2025 

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 Link: [Course Website](https://canvas.harvard.edu/courses/156938) 

 

 

 

This course focuses on fashion and clothing in Japan and Korea from pre-1900 to the present day. It aims to build a knowledge base of historically contextualized case studies through readings, lectures, and discussion. It examines clothing as a site of societal debate, personal and collective identity formation, and philosophical inquiry. Theoretical readings will allow students to apply what they learn to a variety of topics beyond East Asia for final papers and projects. Topics will engage with issues of gender, colonialism, and racialization in inter-Asian and internationalist contexts.

Methods of analysis will include examining 1) the *image* of fashion and clothing (photographs, film, visual media, memory); 2) fashion as *text*, or written clothing—how clothing becomes fashion through discourse; and 3) the *materiality* of dress. To study materiality, the course includes a lab section where students will examine closely textiles and articles of clothing in the collections of the Harvard Museums, and engage in materials workshops (learning for example weaving and dyeing techniques). Students will be encouraged to make connections between form and function and meaning, and to incorporate a knowledge of technological constraint and possibility into their own analyses of clothing and fashion.



 

 



 

 See also:- [ Fall 2025 ](/classterm/fall-2025)
- [ undergraduate, graduate ](/classtype/undergraduate-graduate)