Our first lecture of the week was kicked off by Professor Jennifer Craik of the School of Fashion & Textiles at the RMIT University of Melbourne, Australia, author of The Face Of Fashion: Cultural Studies in Fashion. Prof. Craik took our morning class on a global tour, showing us how fashion and tourism have intersected in our daily lives, to the point where destination shopping has become as equally valued as destination traveling. Starting with the history of Louis Vuitton and their seminal, stylized, and waterproof canvas bags and steamer cases originally designed for explorers of the late 19th century, leading into the creation of department stores in the 1900s, which were intended as homes away from homes for the upper-class, complete with chapels, libraries and other domestic accoutrements.
Not much has actually changed. It really made you think about some of the absurdities that we thought were things of the past but that we come to embrace in the 21st century, where stores have been advertised as even bigger and better than the tourist attractions we are supposed to be visiting.
A footnote to fashion tourism are Fashion Weeks. Our flashy little blue planet is now home to over 300 Fashion Weeks world wide with some cities like New York and LA hosting as many as 22 per year. I had no idea. I always thought the intention of these events was to cater to buyers within the industry but it seems that municipal organizations have always had their place in the events, starting with the first of their kind in New York in 1943. As I discovered, Fashion Weeks are as much industry as they are city marketing and PR.
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