Throughout history, fashion has been criticized for being superficial and out of touch with reality. As sociologist Yuniya Kawamura writes in her book Fashion-ology from 2005, fashion has been attacked by both scholars and feminists and didn’t become a legitimate research topic until recently (basically in the eighties, when fashion studies was established as an academic field). She quotes Sandra Niessen and Anne Brydon, who describe different historical attitudes towards fashion: “Social analyses uniformly condemned fashion. Feminists critiqued the sexual politics and gender oppression inhering in clothing which hobble and confine women. Marxists critiqued the fetishism of fashion and the ideology of conspicuous consumption. Psychologists treated fashion adherence as pathology.” By Maria Ben Saad