STUDYING FASHION USING INTERDISCIPLINARY APPROACH TO CONTRIBUTE TOWARDS THE DEVELOPMENT OF INDONESIAN CREATIVE ECONOMY

This paper discovers how to see fashion as an interdisciplinary area of study. The rapid development of Indonesian fashion industry and its huge contribution towards Indonesian creative economy in fact, are not balanced with the research and study of fashion. Fashion is originally a western culture and the terminology itself has been used since 16th century. There are numerous publications about fashion using psychological, social, or cultural approach. Mainstream fashion industry in western country has been growing enormously and came with several innovations, meanwhile, Indonesia is merely known as consumers and manufacturer worker despite it richness in culture, textile, and craftsmanship. There is confusion between clothing and fashion that might be the cause of why fashion education in Indonesia mostly evolved in vocational area and merely focusing on hard skills development, whereas fashion is supposed to be more complex. However, based on statistic data from Indonesian Creative Industry Council, fashion industry is the second largest GDP contributor and the highest amount of exporter within creative industry, while one of the biggest obstacles in developing it is in the research and development. Author believes that to study fashion using interdisciplinary approach academically might be able to become solution to contribute towards the development of Indonesian creative economy. Using descriptive qualitative method, this paper tries to cultivate the issues through empirical studies based on literature research and purposive sampling on several case studies. Keywords Creative Economy; Fashion; Fashion Studies; Inter-disciplin