How do fashion designers design? How does design function within the industry? How can design practices open up sustainable pathways for fashion's future? Designing Fashion's Future responds to these ...questions to offer a fresh understanding of design practices within the sprawling, shifting fashion system.Fashion design is typically viewed as the rarefied practice of elite professionals, or else as a single stage within the apparel value chain. Alice Payne shows how design needn't be reduced to a set of decisions by a designer or design team, but can instead be examined as a process, object, or agent that shapes fashion's material and symbolic worlds. Designing Fashion's Future draws on more than 50 interviews with industry professionals based in Australia, Asia, North America, Europe, and the United Kingdom. These diverse perspectives from multinational retailers, independent and experimental contexts ground the discussion in contemporary industry practices.
The History of Fashion Journalism is a uniquely comprehensive study of the development of the industry from its origins to the present day, and including professionals’ such as Dylan Jones’s vision ...of the future. Covering everything from early tailor's catalogues through to contemporary publications such as LOVE, together with blogs such as StyleBubble, and countries from France through to the United States, The History of Fashion Journalism explores the origins and influence of such well-known magazines as Nova, Vogue and Glamour. Combining an overview of the key moments in fashion journalism history with close textual analysis, Kate Nelson Best brings to life the evolving face of the fashion media and its relationship with the fashion industry, national politics, consumer culture and gender. This accessible and highly engaging book will be an invaluable resource not only for fashion studies students but also for those in media studies and cultural studies.
For any market to work properly, certain key elements are necessary: competition, pricing, rules, clearly defined offers, and easy access to information. Without these components, there would be ...chaos. Orderly Fashion examines how order is maintained in the different interconnected consumer, producer, and credit markets of the global fashion industry. From retailers in Sweden and the United Kingdom to producers in India and Turkey, Patrik Aspers focuses on branded garment retailers--chains such as Gap, H&M, Old Navy, Topshop, and Zara. Aspers investigates these retailers' interactions and competition in the consumer market for fashion garments, traces connections between producer and consumer markets, and demonstrates why market order is best understood through an analysis of its different forms of social construction.
Less than three decades ago, when the Chinese bought cloth or clothes, they would have had to use a government-issued coupon. Today the Chinese fashion industry is one of the most dynamic in the ...world - it not only supplies fashions to the increasingly discerning domestic market, but also provides one-third of the clothing sold in the global market. How did this phenomenal transition come about? What can the growth of the Chinese fashion industry tell us about the post-Mao China? What roles do the local and the global play in the dramatic changes? This book offers a historically informed, ethnographically grounded and interpretive analysis of contemporary Chinese fashion and the fashion industry. It examines the interplay of state politics, market forces, local social and cultural factors, and the global political economy, both in the rise of the Chinese fashion industry and in the life and work of Chinese fashion professionals. As the first ethnographic account of the Chinese fashion industry in the post-Mao era, The Chinese Fashion Industry combines first-hand accounts with sophisticated cultural analysis to offer new insights, and will be of interest to students and scholars of fashion, anthropology and China.
Letter from the Editor Steele, Valerie
Fashion theory,
01/2022, Volume:
26, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Famous for “morphing art, fashion and technology,” Iris van Herpen is one of the most original and important designers working today. In her fascinating article, “Fractal Folds: The Posthuman Fashion ...of Iris van Herpen,” Anneke Smelik combines a “thick description” of van Herpen’s design practice with an interpretive framework based on critical posthumanism. The concept of the posthuman is a hybrid combining the biological and the technological. Similarly, van Herpen’s work emphasizes the intertwining of human and non-human, the body and a range of technologies—from hand work to 3D printing and the “Morphogenesis” technique—often in the interest of representing “flowing” phenomena such as a splash of water, sound waves, a wisp of smoke, magnetic fields, or dreamscapes. The results are “affective” in the sense that “they move and affect” viewers by presenting a visionary encounter between a human body and something else.
Taking cultural theorist Michel de Certeau’s notion of ‘the everyday’ as a critical starting point, this book considers how fashion shapes and is shaped by everyday life. Looking historically for the ...imprint of fashion within everyday routines such as going to work or shopping, or in leisure activities like dancing, the book identifies the ‘fashion system of the ordinary’, in which clothing has a distinct role in the making of self and identity. Exploring the period from 1890 to 2010, the study is located in London and New York, cities that emerged as socially, ethnically and culturally diverse, as well as increasingly fashionable. The book re-focuses fashion discourse away from well-trodden, power-laden dynamics, towards a re-evaluation of time, memory and above all history, and their relationship to fashion and everyday life. The importance of place and space - and issues of gender, race and social class - provides the broader framework, revealing fashion as both routine and exceptional, and as an increasingly significant part of urban life. By focusing on key themes such as clothing the city, what is worn on the streets, the imagining and performing of multiple identities by dressing up and down, going out and showing off, Fashion and Everyday Life makes a unique contribution to the literature of fashion studies, fashion history, cultural studies and beyond.
This is the first anthology of fashion criticism, a growing field that has been too long overlooked. Fashion Criticism aims to redress the balance, claiming a place for writing on fashion alongside ...other more well-established areas of criticism.Exploring the history of fashion criticism in the English language, this essential work takes readers from the writing published in avant-garde modernist magazines at the beginning of the twentieth century to the fashion criticism of Robin Givhan-the first fashion critic to win a Pulitzer Prize-and of Judith Thurman, a National Book Award winner. It covers the shift in newspapers from the so-called "women's pages" to the contemporary style sections, while unearthing the work of cultural critics and writers on fashion including Susan Sontag and Eve Babitz (Vogue), Bebe Moore Campbell (Ebony), Angela Carter (New Statesman) and Hilton Als (New Yorker).Examining the gender dynamics of the field and its historical association with the feminine, Fashion Criticism demonstrates how fashion has gained ground as a subject of critical analysis, capitalizing on the centrality of dress and clothing in an increasingly visual and digital world. The book argues that fashion criticism occupied a central role in negotiating shifting gender roles as well as shifting understandings of race.Bringing together two centuries of previously uncollected articles and writings, from Oscar Wilde's editorials in The Woman's World to the ground-breaking fashion journalism of the 1980s and today's proliferation of fashion bloggers, it will be an essential resource for students of fashion studies, media and journalism.
This unique ethnographic investigation examines the role that fashion plays in the production of the contemporary Indian luxury aesthetic. Tracking luxury Indian fashion from its production in ...village craft workshops via upmarket design studios to fashion soirées, Kuldova investigates the Indian luxury fashion market’s dependence on the production of thousands of artisans all over India, revealing a complex system of hierarchies and exploitation. In recent years, contemporary Indian design has dismissed the influence of the West and has focused on the opulent heritage luxury of the maharajas, Gulf monarchies and the Mughal Empire. Luxury Indian Fashion argues that the desire for a luxury aesthetic has become a significant force in the attempt to define contemporary Indian society. From the cultivation of erotic capital in businesswomen’s dress to a discussion of masculinity and muscular neo-royals to staged designer funerals, Luxury Indian Fashion analyzes the production, consumption and aesthetics of luxury and power in India.
PDF
