Professor Jonathan Faiers BA (Hons.), P.G.Dip, MA (Dist.), PhD.
Professor of Fashion Thinking, Co-Director of the Winchester Luxury Research Group
Jonathan Faiers is Professor of Fashion Thinking at Winchester School of Art, teaching across a number of arts and design courses on the history of dress and textiles and fashion as material culture. He supervises a number of PhD students working in the fields of fashion and textiles and is engaged in a number of on-going research projects centred on luxury, fur, dress and identity.
In all societies the body is ‘dressed’, and everywhere dress and adornment play symbolic, communicative and aesthetic roles. Dress is always ‘unspeakably meaningful.’ From Elizabeth Wilson. Adorned in Dreams
Jonathan’s research examines the interface between popular culture, textiles and dress. Mainstream cinema is an abiding source of inspiration for much of Jonathan’s work and he has published widely on the relationship between film, fashion and textiles culminating in his book Dressing Dangerously: Dysfunctional Fashion in Film (Yale University Press, 2013), which investigates cinema’s utilisation of clothing to create discourses centred on themes such as loss, vulnerability and replication. His critically acclaimed work Tartan (Berg, 2008) interrogated the myth of clanship and established tartan as a ‘textile transporter’, a cloth of opposition whose troubled history has made it uniquely capable of expressing both subversion and conformity, innovation and tradition; a concept which Jonathan has lectured and spoken about widely on television and radio. A new paperback version of Tartan in in preparation which will include additional material on tartan and masculinity and tartan and nationalism.
Jonathan’s early training as a fashion and theatre designer and his subsequent career as a visual artist has been fundamental to his interdisciplinary approach to teaching, writing and curation. Recently he has written essays for Alexander McQueen (V&A. 2015), Developing Dress History: New Directions in Method and Practice (Bloomsbury. 2015), London Couture 1923-1975: British Luxury (V&A. 2015) and Critical Luxury Studies: Art, Design and Media (Edinburgh University Press. 2016), Expedition: Fashion from the Extreme (F.I.T./Thames & Hudson 2017), A Companion to Contemporary Design Since 1945 (Blackwell 2018), and Ravishing: The Rose in Fashion (Yale/F.I.T. 2020). He lectures widely on textiles and dress and is a member of the organising committee for the Costume Colloquium, Florence. In 2014 Jonathan launched Luxury: History, Culture, Consumption (Taylor & Francis Routledge); the first peer-reviewed, academic journal to investigate this globally contested term and is a founder member and co-director of the Winchester Luxury Research Group.
His most recent research has focused on fur and culminated in a major new socio-cultural study published by Yale University Press in 2020
'The first and only book of its kind, Fur: A Sensitive History looks at the impact of fur on society, politics, and, of course, fashion. This material has a long, complex, and rich history, culminating in recent and ongoing anti-fur debates. Jonathan Faiers discusses how fur—long praised for its warmth, softness, and connotation of status—became so controversial, at the center of campaigns against animal cruelty and the movement toward ethical fashion. At the same time, fake fur now faces a backlash of its own, given the environmental impact of its manufacture and its links to fast fashion.
Divided into five sections—dedicated to hair, pelt, coat, skin, and fleece—the book surveys not only the politics of fur but also its centrality to western fashion, the tactile pleasure it gives, and its use in literature, art, and film. This thoughtfully reasoned, eloquently written, and spectacularly illustrated examination of fur is both timely and essential, filling a gap in fashion scholarship and appealing to a broad audience’