Scandia utblick. Swedish Fashion History Today

Abstract

The field of Swedish fashion history is expanding more than ever before, but it remains a small and vulnerable environment. Few researchers devote themselves to fashion history as their main area of expertise. Fashion history is a relatively new field of research with roots in ethnology, art history, and museums. Today, there is a Swedish fashion history network, but the environment needs to be strengthened with doctoral projects and more collaboration. For a long time, fashion was associated with superficiality in both everyday life and in academia. Fashion was therefore not seen as an important social phenomenon until the 1980s, when British researchers published significant studies. This also influenced the emergence of the field in Sweden. For a long time, fashion historians focused on studies of fashion in relation to constructions of femininity, while men’s clothing was overlooked. Since the end of the 2000s, this has changed, both internationally and in Sweden. Today, a great deal of research is being conducted on men’s fashion in Sweden, given the size of the field. The main criticism, however, is that fashion history research is Eurocentric, both in terms of the places studied and the narrative of fashion’s development. For a long time, the idea that fashion only existed in the Western world has characterized research. This has been debated since ”the global turn”, and has resulted in a broadening of the field of fashion history.