Looking at fashion as a field of cultural production and creative industry, students in this course will analyze the material and creative practices of garment making and fashion design within the context of neoliberalism and capitalist power structures. The first part of the course will be dedicated to understanding the designer’s relationship to the creative and technical practices of the designing and making of clothes, and how individual and collective abilities, skills and attitudes impact the form and meaning of the final products. By incorporating also hands-on engagements with clothing repair, alteration, and care, students will explore how their physical involvement with clothes, through labor and creative thinking, changes their relationship with them. In the second part, we examine these practices in the context of capitalism, economic growth, and political agency of fashion. How does fashion tap into the notion of “cultural production”? What is produced by the fashion industry, culture or commodities? We will focus on the tensions between the economic, political, and cultural aspects of fashion, i.e the practice and praxis constituting the fashion phenomenon. – Finally, we consider the extent to which fashion designers are expected to produce cultural value and/or to satisfy the financial interests of the fashion system. How much are they expected to merge these two sets of objectives into an independent and influential form capable of changing the cultural meaning of the clothes we wear. Through seminars, workshops, readings, discussions and guest lectures of designers, the course will develop informed knowledge of our relationships with fashion as clothes, experience, making process, and design practice.