What is fashion?  How does fashion have the power to affect the way we perceive ourselves and the way others perceive us? How does fashion transform and brand the identities of cities and countries? How and why do clothing, accessories, make-up, and fragrances have the power to transform and reshape the body, to make it feel at ease with a particular fabric and cut, and either go about our day either comfortable with ourselves or make us feel completely ill at ease?

The search for answers to these questions has prompted scholars from a vast variety of fields to study, investigate and take seriously fashion. Scholarship has stripped fashion of its apparent light and frivolous reputation, and has uncovered the many complex layers that it conceals.

Fashion has added a new dimension and breadth to the study of culture, art, economic and political transformations and has given us a new language of self and identity woven into the multilayered webs of social relations.

Tangible signs of the scholarly interest in fashion are the two programs offered at the CUNY Graduate Center:

an interdisciplinary PhD Concentration in Fashion Studies;

and a Fashion Studies track in the MA in Liberal Studies.