Clothing Cultures - Volume 8, Issue 2, 2021

Once purchased, clothing spends the majority of its life ensconced in a wardrobe until it is selected, to be worn or is finally forgotten about or discarded. The wearing of a garment also changes over time as a person’s body size, taste and lifestyle develop. The research explores these changing facets through a pedagogic research project – Keepers of Lost Clothes – that centred on embedding sustainability within the fashion design curriculum. It explored the contemporary relationship we have with discarded garments and considered how this clothing could be remade and reconsidered. Garments were created from clothes that wearers had fallen out of love with; found in the back of the wardrobe, the bottom of the drawer or on a charity shop rail. They were washed, ironed, unpicked, dismantled, cut and re-stitched, to recreate new clothes to fall in love with. The Keepers of Lost Clothes project is evaluated in relation to the sustainable approach of the Make Do and Mend initiative established in the Second World War. This encouraged people to remake, recycle and envision new ways to wear their clothes at a time when garment production had virtually ceased. Key factors are identified from both initiatives to ascertain a global direction for remade and recycled fashion and how this can enrich the future of fashion design and education.

When US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez debuted at Met Gala in September 2021, her white dress with the words ‘Tax the rich’ scrawled in large red letters spawned a fierce debate on the political message conveyed. In this article, we want to reconfigure the choice of Ocasio-Cortez from a cultural perspective and make sense of the ongoing legacy of the ‘Little White Dress’, a garment that appears as a sort of canvas to express social and political statements. Its genealogy is indeed complex and obscure. Following Naomi Lubrich’s reconstruction, the dress appeared during the French Revolution probably as a sartorial tribute to democracy modelled on an ancient Greek women’s gown, but it was also worn by Queen Marie Antoinette as a symbol of innocence and martyrdom. It was then adopted by Napoleon’s wife Joséphine as a recalling of her Caribbean ascent and fully integrated into the imperial fashion as a sign of the sobriety of classical antiquity. During the Revolution and the Empire, women’s magazines matched the dress with an astonishing range of exotic accessories, showing how polyvalent the dress was; its meaning, however, grew more and more connected to the political sphere and from time to time linked with colonialism, Jewish emancipation and the abolition of slavery. In the recent scenario, the dress has reappeared in some important cultural events, shining for its talent to support political messages and challenging the observers to make sense of its polyhedric nature.

This article examines the representations of fashion and clothing through the history of Copenhagen films and TV shows. Because a comprehensive study of Copenhagen media does not yet exist, we have reviewed, compiled and analysed many examples of historical and contemporary films and television shows that have a special relationship with the city and its fashion. We examine the ways in which the city is mediated, how various film genres (including social realism, historical costume dramas and contemporary lifestyle dramas) and TV shows (ranging from historical and political dramas to Nordic noir crime series) use the characters’ clothing as signifiers and representations of class, careers, lifestyles and identities. The clothing and fashion in these works reveal many underlying cultural messages, motivations of the characters, as well as important social, cultural and political commentary on the city as a microcosm for society at large. Our methodology is grounded in cultural history, fashion history and media analysis, with a particular attention to the cultural, political and urban transformations in Copenhagen over the decades, and the role fashion plays in the city’s cultural landscape.

Clothing style and the extent of body revealing in public are cultural and social factors that can influence one’s beauty investments and assessments of attractiveness. To explore this further, we recruited 99 Polish women from Poland (perceived to represent a western approach to dress and body) and 100 Iranian women from Iran (perceived to represent a Muslim culture with a more modest approach to dress). We asked these women to respond to questionnaires to test whether cultural norms regarding one’s clothing are linked to investments in one’s beauty and self-perceived attractiveness. In line with our hypotheses, Polish women (who have more freedom to reveal their bodies publicly) spent more time caring for their bodies than Iranian women. Polish women also spent more time caring for their bodies than their faces. However, contrary to our predictions, Iranian women did not spend more time caring for their faces than their bodies. In fact, Iranian women did not spend more time caring for their faces than Polish women. Furthermore, we observed that older participants spent less time thinking about their attractiveness and owned fewer care products than younger participants. We further discuss our findings in the context of cultural norms regarding female body dressing and how it might relate to beauty investments.

It is widely acknowledged that clothing serves as our second skin. Colour plays a significant role in our choice when selecting our clothing, as well as in social and cultural realities, various rituals, everyday practices, and individual or group identities. In this study, we discuss consumer clothing choices in relation to colour based on data analysis drawn from focus group-based research. Analysis of the data revealed not only the importance that colour holds for consumers, but also that there exist different types of colour consumers and that different colour consumption attributes coexist. Moreover the study presents consumers’ colour preferences through different lenses; internal forces (colour preferences in connection to consumers’ identity, mood and body image), colour attributes (shade, matching colours, colour maintenance), external structures (colour preferences in connection to weather conditions and markets) and social factors (social acceptance and cultural context).