This course looks at the making of “New York Fashion,” as an imaginary, aesthetic style, industry, practice, social and economic force, and global fashion capital of the world. Exploring its meanings through discourse, material culture, image and film, we will treat “New York Fashion” as an object of inquiry whose meanings are continuously produced, negotiated, and defined. How might we understand New York fashion through notions of creativity, technology, the historical transformations of the city, as immigration and labor, as the ecological making of material culture and design forms? How is New York fashion an experiment that is lived, designed, shopped, styled, visualized, performed, and worn on streets and neighborhoods? How is New York Fashion imagined through images, media, television and film, as a global imaginary of creativity and desire? What is New York Fashion as a sensibility or attitude, as sartorial communication or vernacular style? New York Fashion is an entity and energy that brings to it all those wanting to participate in its creative possibilities, its rags to riches stories, to live out a dream of expressing oneself openly, creatively, and freely. This course seeks new narratives to make visible alternative histories of what New York Fashion might be while using the city as a classroom. Students will also have the opportunity to collectively shape what’s explored together in this course.