Fashion
Fashion Education
The Systemic Revolution
Fashion Education explores how the classroom can transform the fashion industry towards body inclusion and social justice.
The book is a collection of 17 essays by fashion educators from Australia, Canada, the US and the UK who recount their experiences, struggles and strategies of reimagining the exclusive foundation of fashion pedagogy and redesigning fashion curricula to centre Indigenous, Black, brown, fat, disabled, trans and queer worldviews, histories and bodies.
This is the first book to explore the relationships between fashion pedagogy and social justice, and to map out new pedagogical frameworks and tools to redistribute power through fashion education. It shares the teaching practices of fashion educators implementing radical pedagogies and offers practical case studies that engage with a number of intersectional positions.
Fashion Education engages with current pressing concerns for educators and is a valuable teaching resource for fashion educators – both theory and practice – working in art and design schools in Europe, the US and the UK.
With chapters covering fashion theory, history, business, communication and design curricula to centre Indigenous, Black, brown, fat, disabled, trans, queer worldviews, histories and peoples it will appeal directly to the many disciplines within fashion. The discussions are also relevant to educators in other art, design and creative fields also looking to centre inclusion in their courses and the strategies presented will apply to them.
Contributions from Tanveer Ahmed, Kevin Almond, Avalon Acaso, Ben Barry, Mal Burkinshaw, Johnathan Clancy, Robin J. Chantree, Deborah A. Christel, Brittany Dickinson, Greg Climer, Bianca Garcia, Denise Nicole Green, Alicia Johnson, Lucy Jones, Grace Jun, Carmen Keist, Riley Kucheran, Michael Mamp, Krys Osei, Lauren Downing Peters, Alexis Quinney, Kelly L. Reddy-Best, Austin Reeves, Joshua Simon, Colleen Schindler-Lynch, Brandon Spencer and Sang Thai
Canadian Critical Luxury Studies
Decentring Luxury
Canadian Critical Luxury Studies: Decentering Luxury is a dynamic new contribution to the study of luxury. The essays in this collection challenge Euro- and US-centric perceptions that bind luxury to either a colonial past or a consumerist present. The book announces a new collective of thinkers who focus on Indigenous and Canadian instances of luxurious production, experiences and sites to propose a new definition of luxury that includes a plurality of regional practices highlighting that Canadian luxury centres on community and connection.
Each of the interdisciplinary contributions analyse luxury from different vantage points to understand why luxury has succeeded or failed in the Canadian context. From the history of the fur trade to the latest Indigenous fashion movement, from the T. Eaton Co.’s 1920s Made-in-Canada campaign to the on-again-off-again Toronto Fashion Week, from Vancouver public art commissions to Montréal’s future-forward fashiontech sector, the essays in this volume explain what makes and breaks Canadian luxury.
These original case studies redefine luxury for Canada – a former colonial possession and contemporary second-tier cultural market – and lay the foundation for the critical study of luxury in other historically secondary geographies that produce, consume and circulate material and symbolic luxuries. The collection ultimately challenges old myths and the mystique surrounding European luxury to give it a new lustre that shines light on those actors who have been historically excluded from its privilege: Indigenous peoples, immigrants, the working classes. It sheds light on the reasons that conventional expressions of luxury may fail in secondary markets and offers guidance for fashiontech innovations that invest in the individual without imposing dehumanizing values of efficiency and rational measurement.
Although focused on the Canadian context, the book will appeal to an international audience of scholarly and industry readers. Its interventions about broadening the focus of luxury studies beyond traditional sites in Western Europe make it an important text for global audiences. It offers an alternate reading of conventional luxury histories, sites and practices; in doing so, it models a national approach to luxury that can be applied to alternate national markets.
Jessica P. Clark is a historian of Britain and empire, with a focus on gender, consumption and labour, and an associate professor of history at Brock University, Ontario, Canada. Nigel Lezama is an associate professor of French studies at Brock University and works at the intersection of fashion, luxury, literary and cultural studies.
Contributions are drawn from a number of fields including, but not limited to, Indigenous studies, museum studies, business management, cultural studies, fashion studies, technology and industry. Contributors include Kathryn Franklin, University of Toronto; Rebecca Halliday, Toronto Metropolitan University; Riley Kucheran, Toronto Metropolitan University; Valérie Lamontagne, Concordia University; Marie O'Mahony, Ontario College of Art and Design; Julia Polyck-O'Neill, York University, Ontario.
This is a primarily an academic book. It is of great relevance to scholars within the subfield of critical luxury studies, as well as scholars of consumer and commodity cultures more broadly, and those working or interested in Canadian studies, media studies, critical studies, and historians.
Researchers and postgraduate students studying luxury as well as those studying the history of the development of Canada, its colonial past and the marginalization of Indigenous people, and with the development of fashion technologies will also find it useful.
Academics and practitioners concerned with the development of city and nation branding will find the book of value.
Heavy Metal Armour: A Visual Study of Battle Jackets
The first of its kind – original, unique and beautifully illustrated by the author. Engagingly written, it will appeal to fans and academics alike.
A lavishly illustrated study of the heavy metal battle jacket in a historical and cultural context, with a unique approach to analysis and interrogation of form and style through painting practice and theory.
Since the 1970s, customized denim 'battle jackets' have been worn by heavy metal fans to signify their devotion to the music and subcultures of metal. Embellished by the wearers with patches, badges and studs, these jackets are works of art that communicate the values of metal to the world at large. This book features a series of detailed paintings that visually document examples of jackets alongside photographic portraits of the fans that wear them.
The accompanying chapters describe the significance of battle jackets in metal scenes and trace a lineage of customized clothing starting in the Middle Ages. Connections are made with a wide range of historic and contemporary artworks, suggesting a broad context within which to more fully appreciate the significance of the jackets. The methodology spans a range of disciplines from art theory to ethnography and subcultural studies, and the discussion is informed by responses from a series of interviews conducted over the years with metal fans.
The book has a highly original focus and the author’s approach to the subject is unique. It reaches across a range of fields: the history and cultural context of heavy metal music, style and dress; art history and practice, particularly painting; subcultural studies; fashion and dress; music graphics, branding and marketing.
Tom Cardwell is an artist and researcher specialising in contemporary painting, customized clothing and heavy metal subcultures. He is senior lecturer in painting at Camberwell, University of the Arts London.
It will appeal to readers with an interest in metal subcultures; fashion, style and dress; music branding and identity; contemporary art theory and practice. The writing style and content is relaxed, engaging and will be of interest to a wider casual readership with an interest in popular culture and the arts.
A useful resource for academics and students interested in heavy metal, customized clothing/DIY subcultures, painting and visual arts. Could appeal to undergraduate as well as postgraduates and scholars in these fields, and a broader interest in visual culture.
Crafting Luxury
Craftsmanship, Manufacture, Technology and the Retail Environment
The idea of luxury has secured a place in contemporary western culture, and the term is now part of common parlance in both established and emerging economies. This book explores the many issues and debates surrounding the idea of luxury.
This new research addresses contentious issues surrounding perceptions of luxury, its relationship to contemporary branding as created by the marketers, and the impact this has on the consumer and their purchasing habits.
Crafting Luxury considers work within the field of luxury and luxury brands, encompassing established companies with a long heritage: from conglomerates and small independents to 'new' luxury and emerging models with innovative practices. It examines the industry structures with respect to production, as well as the hierarchies that exist, and the impact these have on both internal and external perceptions of luxury, from the makers to the sellers and consumers alike. Attention is also given to the working structures of the ateliers, production facilities, origin of materials, manufacture and the impact of technology on consumption, the retail environment and sales, all providing a true insider’s view of this complex world.
The authors – a designer of product and jewellery, a brand strategist and a fashion designer, an architect, and a sociologist and specialist in business management – are practitioners and academics. Their approach to dissecting the complex world of luxury brings distinct viewpoints to the debate, offering different perspectives, thoughts and interpretations of luxury.
Crafting Luxury will appeal to academics and educators, industry specialists and anyone interested in luxury as a concept. It will appeal to those in a variety of academic and industry disciplines: art history, history, social sciences and humanities with an interest in luxury, fashion studies, design, business, cultural studies and textiles. It will also be valuable to students and researchers in social sciences, humanities, business, design, branding, consumption, retail, architecture, cultural studies, fashion studies and textiles.
May also appeal to industry practitioners in retail, design, technology, marketing, the supply chain and manufacture, as well as design professions including architecture, fashion and interior design.
Fashion Knowledge
Theories, Methods, Practices and Politics
This new edited collection assembles academic essays and intellectual activism equally next to visual essays and artistic interventions and proposes a different concept for fashion research that eschews the traditional logic of academic fashion studies. It features acclaimed designers, artists, curators and theorists whose work investigates the multi-faceted debates on the rise of practice-based research in fashion.
The book sets out to explore current issues in fashion research with a particular focus on both methodology and expansion of the field to encompass overlooked voices and narratives. It has a particular concern with the relationships between theory and practice and with how knowledge is created and disseminated in fashion studies. It is an excellent and really valuable contribution to the field at a point both when fashion studies is expanding and when the fashion industry is at a crucial point of change.
Some of the contributions were originally presented at a symposium hosted by the Austrian Center for Fashion Research ‘TALKSHOW: The politics of practice-based fashion research’ at Vienna’s Museum of Applied Arts, curated by Wally Salner. The symposium brought together a group of fashion scholars, designers, educators and practitioners to explore critical contemporary fashion (research) practices, and to investigate critical fashion knowledge between theory and practice, beyond assumed disciplinary and epistemological boundaries. Many contributions in this volume were initially presented at that symposium, while others are testimonies of international debates that were part of the research activities of the Austrian Center for Fashion Research, a research project funded by the Austrian Federal Ministry of Science Research and Economy, led by Elke Gaugele.
The book is structured into three sections: Fashion Knowledge, Practice-Based Fashion Research, and Sites of Fashion and Politics. Contributions look at new forms of fashion knowledge that are forming with and along shifting fashion practices, practice-based fashion research, and sheds light on different sites and entanglements of fashion and politics in distinctive contemporary and historical moments of de/colonization, anti/racism, and anti/globalization.
Elke Gaugele is cultural anthropologist and professor of fashion, styles and contextual design at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, Austria. Monica Titton is a sociologist, fashion theorist and senior scientist at the fashion design department of the University of Applied Arts Vienna, Austria. Other contributions are from Elke Bippus, Astrid Engl, Jojo Gronostay, Ruby Hoette, Bianca Koczan, Priska Morger, NCCFN, Wally Salner, Andreas Spiegl, José Teunissen, Lara Torres, Carol Tulloch and Maria Ziegelböck
Readers will be academics, practitioners, designers, artists, curators, museums, theoretical scholars, lecturers, practice-based researchers, students and practitioners at all levels in the fields of fashion, textile, art and design.
This new book with its original focus on practice-based research will be useful for a general and academic readership alike, and to all those working within the field of fashion studies, including those with a theoretical focus, fashion practitioners and those working within innovative pockets of the fashion industry.
Clothing Goes to War
Creativity Inspired by Scarcity in World War II
Clothing Goes to War: Creativity Inspired by Scarcity in World War II is the story of clothing use when manufacturing for civilians nearly stopped and raw materials and workers across the globe were shifted to war work. Governments mandated rationing programmes in many countries to regulate the limited supply, in hopes that the burden of austerity would be equally shared. Unfortunately, as the war progressed and resources dwindled, neither ration tickets nor money could buy what did not exist on store shelves.
Many people had to get by with their already limited wardrobes, often impacted by the global economic depression of the previous decade. Creativity, courage and perseverance came into play in caring for clothing using handicraft skills including sewing, knitting, mending, darning and repurposing to make limited wardrobes last during long years of austerity and deprivation.
This fascinating page-turner is the first cross cultural account of the difficulties faced by common people experiencing clothing scarcity and rationing during World War II. In person interviews of women from over ten countries are contextualized with stories of the roles played by newly developed textiles, gendered dress in the workplace, handicraft skills often forgotten today, romance and weddings, rationing represented in war era film and the ever-present black market. Period photos from private collections, magazines and periodicals add dimension to this captivating account of the often overlooked role of clothing during World War II.
Clothing Goes to War will appeal to present day readers interested in curtailing their consumption of clothing in an effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions fueling climate change. Adopting the conservation techniques of the World War II generation who: 'made do' and 'wore our clothes until they wore out' will help to curtail the fashion industries negative impact on the environment.
'We made do.'
'We wore patches on our patches.'
'We wore our clothes until they wore out.'
'I was so excited when they had a feed sack with a border print!'
These are just a few examples of the amazing first-hand experiences of women from over ten countries faced with clothing shortages represented in this book. Governments, regardless of which side they were on, enforced rationing and restrictions on clothing so that scarce textiles could be diverted to outfit the military, leaving limited resources for civilians. Many people had to get by with their already limited wardrobes, often impacted by the global economic depression of the previous decade. Creativity, courage and perseverance came into play in caring for clothing using handicraft skills including sewing, knitting, mending, darning and repurposing to make limited wardrobes last during long years of austerity and deprivation.
Seventy-five years later, the lifestyle of Western culture has become more focused on a sense of entitlement and overuse. Recently, a 'slow fashion' movement promoting growing awareness of the negative effects of over consumption on the environment has motivated people to voluntarily restrict their clothing consumption.
This movement echoes the efforts of civilians during World War II to sustain their limited wardrobes. A great deal about leading a more sustainable lifestyle can be learned from the cultural knowledge presented here in the stories of people who lived through the Great Depression and World War II.
Clothing Goes to War represents an important contribution to the history of textiles and clothing, sociology, environmental studies, material culture and the history of World War II.
This is a book that will have genuinely wide appeal. Local historians and craft groups may want to include this in their libraries many craft groups maintain libraries that discuss fashion and craft in wartime.
Academic readership will be among researchers, educators, scholars and students in fashion studies, history, cultural studies and feminist studies, who will particularly value the thorough documentation.
General readers will particularly enjoy the personal stories and close examination or rationing and alternative methods of clothing families. History-loving readers will like to see war from the consumer side of conflict. The current COVID-19 situation provides an unexpected context for many potential readers who until now have never faced lack of consumer goods, hoarding and market-price manipulation.
Fashion, Women and Power
The Politics of Dress
This book addresses the relationships between fashion, women and power. One of the constants within the book is to question the enduring relationship between women and dress and how these inform and articulate the ways in which women remain represented as either suitable or not for public office and their behaviour is informed through dress when they are in power. The book critiques the interplays between politics, power, class, race and expectation in relation to the everyday practice of getting dress and the more performative and symbolic function of dress as embodiment.
As never before, women are in positions of political power, and find themselves facing the maelstroms of mass media regarding their fashion, their deportment, and their right to govern. The contributors offer a wide set of perspectives on women and their roles, and their fashions when taking up powerful positions in Australia, New Zealand, United Kingdom and the United States.
From the United Kingdom, the historical issues surrounding the movement towards ‘rational dress’ for women seeking their rights to vote and exercise are interrogated. The volume also explores viewpoints from East Asia, such as the constricting role for ‘common’ women upon entering the Imperial family in Japan. From the United States come the troublesome media stories engulfing two significant American Democratic First Ladies, Hillary Rodham Clinton and Michelle Obama.
From New Zealand, the media reports on Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern upon her motherhood while serving in the office and on her clothing during the 2019 Christchurch massacre comprise a much-needed contribution to the literature on women, politics and dress.
Further, the role of dress in politics broadly as a form of resistance, will be examined in Australia from recent skirmishes over ‘appropriate dress’ with ex-prime minister Julia Gillard and other Australian female politicians. The role of women and what their fashion selections mean continues via considerable debate during worldwide events. Finally, the theme of resistance and social media continues with an examination of protest dressing in the recent street battles in Hong Kong to how young Asian women have been influenced by the social media campaigns to encourage wearing the veil in Indonesia, to Asian women negotiating femininity in political dress.
Primary readership will be among researchers, scholars, educators and students in the fields of fashion, dress studies, women and gender studies and media and history. It will be of particular value as at graduate level and as a supplementary resource. There may be some general appeal to those with an interest in the women or cultures at the centre of the discussions.
Crossing Gender Boundaries
Fashion to Create, Disrupt and Transcend
This volume presents a collection of the most recent knowledge on the relationship between gender and fashion in historical and contemporary contexts. Through fourteen essays divided into three segments – how dress creates, disrupts and transcends gender – the chapters investigate gender issues through the lens of fashion. Crossing Gender Boundaries first examines how clothing has been, and continues to be, used to create and maintain the binary gender division that has come to permeate Western and westernized cultures. Next, it explores how dress can be used to contest and subvert binary gender expectations, before a final section that considers the meaning of gender and how dress can transcend it, focusing on unisex and genderless clothing.
The essays consider how fashion can both constrict and free gender expression, explore the ways dress and gender are products of one other and illuminate the construction of gender through social norms. Readers will find that through analysis of the relationship between gender and fashion, they gain a better understanding of the world around them.
MASKS
Bowie and Artists of Artifice
This interdisciplinary anthology explores the complex relationships in an artist’s life between fact and fiction, presentation and existence, and critique and creation, and examines the work that ultimately results from these tensions.
Using a combination of critical and personal essays and interviews, MASKS presents Bowie as the key exemplifier of the concept of the 'mask', then further applies the same framework to other liminal artists and thinkers who challenged the established boundaries of the art/pop academic worlds, such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Oscar Wilde, Søren Kierkegaard, Yukio Mishima and Hunter S. Thompson. Featuring contributions from John Gray and Slavoj Žižek and interviews with Gary Lachman and Davide De Angelis, this book will appeal to scholars and students of cultural criticism, aesthetics and the philosophy of art; practising artists; and fans of Bowie and other artists whose work enacts experiments in identity.
The Poetics and Politics of the Veil in Iran
An Archival and Photographic Adventure
This volume explores the lives of women in Iran through the social, political and aesthetic contexts of veiling, unveiling and re-veiling. Through poetic writings and photographs, Azadeh Fatehrad responds to the legacy of the Iranian Revolution via the representation of women in photography, literature and film. The images and texts are documentary, analytical and personal.
The Poetics and Politics of the Veil in Iran features Fatehrad’s own photographs in addition to work by artists Hengameh Golestan, Shirin Neshat, Shadi Ghadirian, Abbas Kiarostami, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Adolf Loos, Gaëtan Gatian de Clérambault and Alison Watt. In exploring women’s lives in post-revolutionary Iran, Fatehrad considers the role of the found image and the relationship between the archive and the present, resulting in an illuminating history of feminism in Iran in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
African Luxury
Aesthetics and Politics
Moving far beyond predominant views of Africa as a place to be 'saved', and even more recent celebratory formulations of it as 'rising', African Luxury: Aesthetics and Politics highlights and critically interrogates the visual and material cultures of lavish and luxurious consumption already present on the continent. Methodologically, conceptually and analytically, the collection dismantles taken-for-granted ideas that the West is the source and focus of high-end and hyper-desirable material cultures. It explores what the culture of consumption means in Africa in both historical and contemporary contexts, studying diverse luxury phenomena including fashion advertising, reality television, retail, gendered consumption and gardening to re-centre the discussion on existing contemporary luxury cultures across the continent.
Planet Cosplay
Costume Play, Identity and Global Fandom
L.A. Chic
A Locational History of Los Angeles Fashion
Los Angeles is undergoing a makeover. Leaving behind its image as all freeways and suburbs, sunshine and noir, it is reinventing itself for the twenty-first century as a walkable, pedestrian friendly, ecologically healthy and global urban hotspot of fashion and style, while driving initiatives to rejuvenate its downtown core, public spaces and ethnic neighborhoods. By providing a locational history of Los Angeles fashion and style mythologies through the lens of institutions such as manufacturing, museums and designers and readings of contemporary film, literature and new media, L.A. Chic provides an in-depth analysis of the social changes, urban processes, desires and politics that inform how the good life is being re-imagined in Los Angeles.
Throughout the book, Susan Ingram and Markus Reisenleitner dig up submerged and marginalized elements of the city’s cultural history but also tap into the global circuits of urban affect that are being mobilized for promoting L.A. as an example for the global, multi-ethnic city of the future. Engagingly written, highly visual and featuring numerous photographs throughout, L.A. Chic will appeal to any culturally inclined reader with an interest in Los Angeles, its cultural history and modern urban style.