Teachers

• Course Director

Prof. Dr. Yoko Takagi (高木陽子)

Yoko TAKAGI is Professor at the Graduate School of Fashion and Living Environment Studies. She is also program director of the Global Fashion Concentration MA program taught in English at Bunka Gakuen University, Tokyo.

She completed her Ph.D. in Art Science and Archaeology at the Free University of Brussels (1999) and published her thesis in 2002: Japonisme in Fin de Siècle Art in Belgium (Antwerp: Pandora).
Currently, she is the General Director of the Society for the Study of Japonisme.

Focusing on trans-boundary aspects of fashion and textile from the end of the nineteenth century to present day, she has contributed to publications and has curated several exhibitions, including “Katagami: Les pochoirs japonais et le japonisme” (Maison culturelle du Japon à Paris in 2006-7),  “6+ Antwerp Fashion” (Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery in 2009),  “Feel and Think: A New Era of Tokyo Fashion” (Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery and Kobe Fashion Museum in 2011-2012 and National Art School Gallery, Sydney in 2013)  and “Katagami Style” (Mitsubishi Ichigokan Museum, The National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto and Mie Prefectural Art Museum in 2012).

She is the organizer of the Transboundary Fashion Seminar series.

Research Interests

・Interdisciplinary approaches to contemporary global issues from the perspective of Fashion Studies
・Japonisme
・Design education
・Fashion and textile exhibition curation

Can supervise PhD, MA: Yes

Dr. Takagi’s students at Masters level have graduated from studies of Fashion and Textile Design at universities including Parsons, London College of Fashion, Ryerson, RMIT, Raffles, London Fashion College, Bunka Gakuen; as well as Art Science, Anthropology, Japanology at universities including Edinburgh, KU Leuven, and Waseda. The Double Degree Program with École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris is available to her students.

Continuing Bunka Gakuen’s tradition of fashion education, she strives to bridge theory and practice within a global context, with a focus on fashion related art and design. Her students have had the opportunity to do internships at high profile Japanese brands Yohji Yamamoto, ANREALAGE and AKIKOAOKI, as well as The National Art Center Tokyo. In 2017-2018, she organized the collaborative project VIEW.S with Zara and students, a collection with Zara x Bunka label which was diffused at global scale.

In her PhD Program, she aims to discipline global level researchers/educators on Fashion Studies and Fashion Design from a non-Western region, Japan. She is certified to supervise dissertations both in English and in Japanese. One of her PhD students, Dr. Daphne Mohajer va Pesaran, defended her thesis “Making and Growing Washi Paper Clothes: A Framework for Interspecies Fashion Design in the Anthropocene” in February 2018 was appointed as full-time lecturer at RMIT University in September 2018. Her recently graduated PhD student, Dr. Saskia Thoelen, defended her thesis “Globalisation and Strategic Change through Art Promotion during the Art Nouveau Period in Japan – Mitsukoshi’s Departmentisation Process Analysed through its Kimono Fashioning Activities” in February 2020, and was appointed as full-time Assistant Professor at the Graduate School of Fashion and Living Environment Studies in Bunka Gakuen University in April 2020.

Students’ research themes examples

PhD students

・Making and Growing Washi Paper Clothes: A Framework for Interspecies Fashion Design in the Anthropocene
・アール・ヌーヴォー期におけるグローバル化とアート戦略  –  着物を通して見る三越の百貨店化プロセス  (Globalisation and Strategic Change through Art Promotion during the Art Nouveau Period in Japan – Mitsukoshi’s Departmentisation Process Analysed through its Kimono Fashioning Activities)

MA students
• Across Time and Interpretations Mapping the Avant-garde in the Future of Fashion
• Superflat Fashion Articulating a New Aesthetic Paradigm
• Haider Ackermann Research on Multiculturalism Expressed Through his Fashion Design Practice
• Understanding Niche Fashion Brands Through the Post-Contemporary Lens
• Fashion Photography and the Absent Body
• Fashioning Loanwords: Sociolinguistic Trends in Clothing Vocabulary in So-En magazine, 1964, 1989 and 2014
• Art Nouveau in Japan: On the Modernization of Crafts and Traditional Dress through Cultural Hybridization
• Blue Hands Blue Hearts: Meaning-Making at a Japanese Indigo Textiles Workshop
• Representing Indigenous Culture in Contemporary Fashion: A Case Study of Ainu Culture in Japan

For more information about Prof. Dr. Yoko Takagi, visit the university website.

 

• Teaching faculty

Dr. Saskia Thoelen (Assistant Professor)
University website introduction link

Claudia Lucia Arana Novoa (Assistant Professor)