Fashion is the origin and the rhythm of modernity: the condition of being modern materializes in the way we dress, consume food and drink, move and entertain us. Since the mid-nineteenth century, across the globe, industrial production methods create a stream of commodities whose consumption needs to be renewed constantly by fashion. In turn, the fashion system reacts quicker than any other part of the culture industry to changing economic, political and cultural circumstances and readily embraces novelty in its technological and material facilities for producing goods. This summer intensive is designed for students interested in critical design practice as well as histories and theories. Through a series of seminars, site visits and workshops we investigate the lineage of fashion’s position in modernity, from early theorists of modernité to late materialist studies of the modern condition. This lineage is filled with detours and deconstructed to demonstrate fashion’s potential to create non-linear histories. Across 8 days (each with 4 hours of class time) the intensive is structured into mornings’ seminar presentations and discussions and afternoons’ writing and designing workshops, as well as visits to sites in New York City. In seminars we discuss textual and visual representations of fashion in modernity, from photography, poetry, sociology, illustration, political economy and film. In the workshops we experiment with creative practices that articulate fashions in histories and theories. Through these seminars and workshops the intensive provides you with an opportunity to research and produce an extended portfolio – of texts, images, or both – that creatively represents fashion’s role in modernity. Students will have an additional week to complete final projects after the two-week intensive.