CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2014
| Author | Zanin, Eva |
|---|---|
| Title | The Politics of Fashion. A Study of the Hungarian Fashion Design Contest "Gombold Ujra!" between 2011 and 2012. |
| Summary | This thesis deals with the critique of the political utilization of fashion in relation to national identity politics by focusing on the institutional discourse of the Hungarian governmentally initiated national fashion contest Gombold Újra! Divat a Magyar (Re-buttoned: Hungarian is in Fashion!). The institutional representation of this fashion contest is foregrounding the aim to reconstitute a renewed, stable and homogeneous nation-state identity. The obligation to produce contemporary fashion design re-using the Hungarian national folklore heritage utilizes a supposed collective tradition together with the generative, value producing social structures and ideologies of fashion as a cultural phenomenon. The result is a theatrical spectacle which flashes out the political ideologies of a new-nationalism, and a desire to gain respectability to the nation, through recycling the national dress heritage in the context of fashion. Although the context of ‘fashion’ is evoked by the rhetoric of the contest and its representation, due to its overtly extensive ideological saturation, the stress on creating a ‘national fashion’ as a counterpart and a concurrent to ‘Western fashion’ gets a much stronger emphasis than the aim to participate in the transnational discourse of fashion industry. In other words, while the governmental initiative ‘brands itself’ as the supporter of Hungarian fashion-talent’s access to ‘the fashion market’ its rhetoric, impregnated with historical politics (re)produces the ideological stance of the ‘other’ fighting for ‘access’ through the demand of acknowledgment by the assumed Western power center(s) of fashion. I am particularly interested in the interrogation of this concept of a ‘national fashion’ from a fashion studies perspective, informed by feminist thinking. I am also aware of its situatedness at the intersections of a Western theoretical practice, that references a particularly transnational industrial and cultural phenomenon, and a post-socialist Hungarian popular cultural context, which shows the symptoms of infections from state-politics. |
| Supervisor | Erzsebet Barat |
| Department | Gender Studies MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2014/zanin_eva.pdf |
Visit the CEU Library.
© 2007-2021, Central European University