Here is a really good article on fashion educators explaining the significance of students learning the history of fashion:
https://www.businessoffashion.com/articles/education/why-fashion-cant-forget-its-references
Some of the teachers are Burkean — learning from the genius of the past — but many of them reason: you cannot make something new and thrive in fashion unless you know how not to repeat the past. Here, the assumption is that what people want is the new (Hume does not disagree [see V&R Chapter 1]).
Lacan reasons: the past shapes what we desire, and in a significant sense, desire is for the past. If designers want to thrive, studying the past is a large part of developing a symmetry between product and personal subjectivity.
