Clothing Cultures - Volume 4, Issue 2, 2017

Failure is a vital part of the creative process – we learn through failure. However, within the current culture that publicly celebrates success and achievement (sometimes at all costs) people are often hesitant to admit their failures – failure has become not just something to experience, but a negative and stigmatizing label, something to be avoided at all costs. Because of this, our ‘congratulatory culture’ reduces the importance of the creative process (including failure), especially in creative work. In this article, we focus on people who encounter failure regularly. We study people who make things with their hands – Do-It-Yourself (DIY) handcrafters who work with fibres and textiles. In our qualitative interview study with 44 North American handcrafters (e.g. those engaged in leisure weaving, knitting, crochet, patchwork), we examine ‘failure’, how handcrafters discuss the importance of failure, and how failure fits importantly into the creative process. We present discourse offered by the studies of the creative process and the importance of ‘failure’, as well as firsthand examples from our research and ethnographic experiences. We explore the complex creative process, including simultaneously positive and negative experiences.

I examine how Paradise Lost by John Milton embeds the first recognition of nudity and the subsequent wearing of clothes in a crucially moral setting, creating a semiotic discourse where the material presence of the first garments signify the ontological change of the first pair. Clothes here, instead of fulfilling the functional purpose of covering the body to protect it from a harsh environment or even the penetrative gaze of the Almighty, reveal the presence of sin and, thus, the absence of innocence. To have knowledge of good and evil, it seems, also implies the knowledge of clothes. The study maps out how the very fact of wearing clothes and the differences between the garments that weave through the epic turn into ambiguous poetic tools, where clothes either represent a barrier between interpretation and meaning or turn into material manifestations of meaning.

The Second Great Awakening (1790–1865) created large numbers of new Christian congregants. In order for churches to effectively minister their burgeoning populations, they enlisted the help of women to serve as itinerant preachers. This research analysed the autobiographies of female preachers, period newspaper articles and imagery to better understand the relationship between the sartorial choices and public personas of female preachers. Most did not align themselves with feminist ideologies of the time but rather claimed the will of God as justification. However, these women were highly criticized and therefore sought a balance between their gender and their faith. This was achieved in part through the adoption of a plain style of dress that stood in stark contrast to superfluous fashions of the time. The style of plain dress was modelled after the attire of the Quakers with neutral colours, no embellishments and simple fabrications. Women were told by male preachers, such as John Wesley, that they should dress plainly. Many congregants, as well as female preachers, told stories of extreme conversions where they immediately eschewed their fashionable clothing.

This article will analyse the use of costume in heterosexual soft-core pictorial pornography. It will focus on the British website onlyallsites.com, which will be positioned as offering a materiality to costume that goes beyond the dressing of the female body. Building on this author’s wider work around clothing and pornography, and previous work on the sociocultural meaning of underwear and fetishism, it will situate its case study within the context of a ‘British erotic’ and emphasize the key role that costume plays in the construction of soft-core pornographic representations.

This study documents and analyses the life and work of Miki Vargas (1973–present), a photographer who captured and promoted images, for both commercial and personal projects, of masculine women and transmen and circulated these photographs in the media where this aesthetic is largely if not almost entirely absent. Vargas worked at the forefront of the burgeoning queer-fashion movement in the twenty-first century as the cornerstone photographer for Saint Harridan, a lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and/or questioning (LGBTQ)-focused brand selling men’s fashion to masculine-of-centre women and transmen. Alongside her commercial work, Vargas created a personal series, The Handsome Revolution, where she captured the fashions and aesthetics of masculine-presenting women or transmen, which have quite a similar aesthetic to her work for Saint Harridan. In this article, I also analyse the alternative styles/photographs in The Handsome Revolution and corresponding statements of what masculinity meant to each participant, which Vargas documented for 98 LGBTQ women and transmen. I highlight how Vargas’ photography work created a space for gender non-conforming individuals to feel empowered by their masculine appearance, aesthetic and continual subject formation. This research examines the ongoing possibilities of gender expression in relation to fashion.

Cotton Road, Laura Kissel

Documentary Education Resources, Running time 1:11:57