Fashion Landscape: Exploring the Cultural Narratives of Fashion

Structured as an open field of investigation, Fashion Landscape brings together five collective research projects, each examining fashion through a different cultural lens while collectively constructing a broader understanding of its social significance.

• Runway To Revolution — by Carla Cifuentes Martínez
• Artwoven — by Kirti Kadam
• Rhythm Runway — by Rowena Viktoria Lee
• Frames of Fashion — by Oğuzhan Özkoçak
• The Language of Clothing — by Jiayi Zhao

Together, these five research paths connect historical events, visual cultures, artistic practices, media, and social movements, demonstrating how fashion constantly evolves alongside the societies that produce it.

Runway To Revolution explores fashion as a powerful meeting point between cultural identity, politics, media, and social transformation. Moving from the visual legacy of Vogue magazine to the influence of military clothing, revolutionary designers, and music subcultures, the project illustrates how fashion has consistently reflected—and often anticipated—major social changes. By examining figures such as Coco Chanel, Christian Dior, and Vivienne Westwood alongside the relationship between style and music, the research presents fashion as an active cultural force capable of recording, challenging, and transforming society.

Artwoven investigates the enduring dialogue between fashion and art across more than a century of creative practice. Beginning with the avant-garde experiments of Paul Poiret and continuing through the work of Sonia Delaunay, Elsa Schiaparelli, post-war artistic movements, Pop culture, conceptual fashion, and contemporary debates around sustainability and craftsmanship, the project reveals how clothing has evolved into a powerful artistic medium. Fashion emerges not merely as design but as a cultural language where artistic expression, identity, and social values are continuously interwoven.

In Rhythm Runway, fashion is explored through its relationship with music, movement, performance, and collective memory. From the influence of the Ballets Russes and early twentieth-century dance culture to jazz, youth movements, political protest, digital media, and sustainability, the research follows the rhythms that have shaped both clothing and society. Fashion becomes a visible expression of cultural tempo, revealing how garments respond to changing forms of identity, resistance, entertainment, and social participation across generations.

Frames of Fashion focuses on the evolution of fashion media and the ways images have constructed our understanding of clothing, beauty, and identity. Beginning with early illustrated magazines such as La Gazette du Bon Ton, the research traces the transition from handcrafted print culture to modern editorial design, influential fashion photography, celebrity culture, blogs, social media, and today’s algorithm-driven platforms. The project highlights how visual communication has continually redefined authorship, visibility, and the production of fashion culture, demonstrating that images are as influential as garments themselves.

The Language of Clothing examines the relationship between the female body and fashion from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present day. Through themes such as corset reform, the abolition of foot-binding, women’s participation in the workforce, youth culture, globalization, consumer society, and contemporary identity politics, the research shows how clothing reflects changing ideas of freedom, power, representation, and resistance. Rather than treating garments as simple products, the project interprets fashion as a cultural language through which societies negotiate values, identities, and social transformation.

One of the defining aspects of Fashion Landscape is its rejection of a linear historical narrative. Instead of moving decade by decade through fashion history, the podcast encourages students to construct personal and collective research maps that reveal relationships between ideas, people, images, events, and cultural phenomena.

This research methodology promotes curiosity, interdisciplinary thinking, and critical analysis, allowing fashion to be interpreted from multiple perspectives rather than through a single historical timeline. By combining academic research with creative storytelling, the project demonstrates that fashion is deeply embedded within broader cultural transformations and can serve as a powerful lens through which to understand society itself.

Fashion Landscape ultimately positions research as an open and evolving process, where connections are often more meaningful than chronology, and where fashion becomes a vehicle for exploring the complexity of the contemporary world.

Fashion Landscape invites listeners to discover how emerging designers and researchers are rethinking the role of fashion within contemporary culture. Through five original research projects, the podcast offers a multidisciplinary journey across history, art, politics, media, music, and identity, revealing fashion as one of the most dynamic cultural languages of our time.

More than a podcast, Fashion Landscape is an invitation to look beyond garments and trends, exploring the ideas, movements, and cultural transformations that continue to shape the way we dress—and the way we understand ourselves.