When I read or hear the word “frock”, my heart sinks and my hackles rise: when will fashion be taken seriously? As the most powerful form of non-verbal communication, clothes tell us a lot about people – from their occupation, to religion, to their Indigenous heritage. The now thriving academic discipline of fashion studies rose from schools of anthropology, ethnography, sociology, philosophy, curatorial scholarship and art history. The first postgraduate course in the history of dress was set up in 1965 at the Courtauld Institute – a bastion of the art establishment – to enable curators and art historians to date paintings and describe garments in them accurately. Sadly, many of them continue to get it wrong.
Jonathan Jones’s review of the Sargent exhibition at Tate Britain (Sargent and Fashion review – tragicomic travesty is a frock horror, 20 February) was typical of the snobbish and dismissive attitude often taken towards anything to do with fashion, including the multitrillion-dollar fashion industry that, for better or for worse, ranks as one of the biggest in the global economy, a fact that is seldom recognised. If it was called “garment manufacture” instead of “fashion”, a complicated word freighted with negative connotations, it might be.
