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Affiliative Fashion, Relational Analysis and Power
  • ISSN: 2051-7106
  • E-ISSN: 2051-7114
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Abstract

This article aims to recontextualize the work of French fashion designer Sonia Rykiel from an affiliative point of view by disentangling the various relations caught up in the materialization of her designs. In her manifesto from 1977, Rykiel states that her design practice was a way of ‘translating the political mood of the day’, a statement against fashion’s time-based hierarchies of trends and diktats. Through a concentric, relational reading of these creations, informed by mood theory, as well as feminist notions related to the sociocultural milieu of Rykiel, such as Hélène Cixous’s notion of and Antoinette Fouque’s , the article aims to draw out the importance of a relational perspective for fashion studies. By elucidating how a design poetic can express the changes in mood of a certain time, place and sociocultural milieu, we can understand how it can, in turn, affect this milieu and its mood.

Funding
This study was supported by the:
  • FWO Vlaanderen Senior Research Project (Award G067824N)
© 2025 The Author(s). Published by Intellect Ltd.
This article is Open Access under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The CC BY licence permits commercial and noncommercial reuse. To view a copy of the licence, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
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2025-10-24
2026-02-11
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/content/journals/10.1386/infs_00137_1
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‘Vivre l’époque’: A relational reading of mood, selfhood and feminist world-making in the work of Sonia Rykiel
International Journal of Fashion Studies 12, 197 (2025); https://doi.org/10.1386/infs_00137_1
/content/journals/10.1386/infs_00137_1
/content/journals/10.1386/infs_00137_1
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  • Article Type: Article
Keyword(s): affiliative fashion; démode; fashion design; feminism; Hélène Cixous; mood theory; motherhood; écriture feminine

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