Lise Skov: Encyclopedic knowledge of fashion and dress
Associate professor
Copenhagen Business School
This paper analyses the role of encyclopedias in producing, presenting and sustaining knowledge about fashion and dress. The first encyclopedia to address to issue of fashion was Diderot’s and D’Alembert’s great French enlightenment encyclopedia, that was published from 1751-1772. It can therefore be said that the issue of encyclopedic knowledge of fashion is as old as encyclopedias themselves.
Since then, there have been multiple handbooks documentating dress history, famous designers or production methods. It is only as recent as 2005 that a major three-volume Encyclopedia on Fashion and Dress was published by Charles Scribner’s Sons under the editorship of Valerie Steele. In addition, preparations have already been made for a 10-volume encyclopedia by Berg Publishers, titled Encyclopedia of World Dress and Fashion, with Joanne Eicher as the editor-in-chief. Building on Joanne Eicher’s extensive work in the discipline of anthropology on developing definitions to be used in the study of dress, the intention of the encyclopedia is to redress the habitual Euro-centric bias in the study of fashion and dress and cover to the whole world equally.
I serve as the editor of the Western Europe volume of the Berg encyclopedia, and this paper is based on reflections of the initial stages of this work. More specifically it addresses the problems and choices involved in developing a table of contents for the volume, including a complete list of entries, keywords and specifications, number of words per entry and identifying potential authors. This work involves a great deal of definitions – from the geographical regions to terminology – such as world dress, ethnic dress – that mark the theoretical stance of the encyclopedia. The paper will give examples of such definition work. However, the purpose of the paper is not to present a list of authoritative definitions, but to analyse the actual process of categorising, naming and ordering that are essential to the building of knowledge.
The paper is informed by social constructionism which always perceives speech acts in a power struggle. An editorial choice in an encyclopedia thus involves power to define. Furthermore, as encyclopedic knowledge is not a naturally given reflection of reality, editorial choices also contain an element of creativity in the construction of a representation of reality. The assumption is that all types of knowledge undergo alternate processes of (re)construction and (re)definition, on the one hand, and consolidation and naturalization, on the other. As the encyclopedia, which is due to be published in 2010, is intended to serve as an authoritative work for many year in the future, the current process of designing its content provides a unique glimpse into the construction of knowledge.
Finally, the paper offers reflections on the changing role of knowledge in relation to fashion and dress today, relating to overall social and economic changes, sometimes referred to as knowledge society and knowledge economy. One of the perhaps paradoxical effects of this is a widespread dematerialisation of knowledge in fashion and dress research, education and production.