Clothing Cultures - Volume 3, Issue 1, 2016

This article discusses how the Royal Festival Hall (RFH) was featured as a location in editorial photo-spreads published in British fashion periodicals Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar throughout 1952.1 It invites another way of looking at the RFH, an often-celebrated architectural icon of British post-war history and democratic achievement. This article focuses upon the spatiality of the fashion magazine and addresses how this particular object context can aid the historical analysis of fashion imagery, and representations of space. Here a history of fashion, dress codes, femininity, modern architecture and post-war public cultural space is garnered within the sequential layout of the fashion magazine page.

Purpose: Outline the dimensions of the luxury shopping experience that distinguish it from hedonic shopping in other contexts. Focus on the meaning the luxury flagship shopping experience has to consumers at the point of purchase.

Design: Ethnographic field study. Observation, interviews and analysis of responses of twenty shoppers at the Louis Vuitton flagship on the Champs-Élysées in Paris.

Findings: Identification of seven general types of experience, the most prevalent having to do with the Paris location and French cultural associations that the brand connotes through the store. Shoppers respond to the symbolic attributes of the brand in defining and enacting a self in the store environment.

Research Limitations: An exploratory study with a small sample and brief interviews. Larger samples at this and other locations will provide us with more data on the key attributes of luxury shopping.

Practical implications: Furthers knowledge on experiential shopping by allowing customers to share their motivations. Of interest to academics and luxury retailers as it illustrates the importance of the store environment and location to customers.

Social implications: Furthers our understanding of the individual in contemporary consumer society within a branded context where the self is dramatically put into play.

Originality/value: Louis Vuitton occupies an important place within the rarified world of luxury brands catering to the aspirations and fantasies of customers. Understanding subjective meanings provided by shoppers as they exist, the store provides a greater depth of understanding of the customer response to luxury brands.

This article suggests that fashion communication, especially fashion advertising, is a form of propaganda, and that propaganda is sometimes disguised as a form of sartorial communication. Just as advertisers and marketers in modern corporate societies use propaganda to mobilize a target audience and to sell goods infinitely, early Communism in Hungary set its sights on women and sought to generate its ideology and practices through them. Understanding the social importance of fashion for women and aspiring to win over an apolitical female citizenry, Hungarian Communists chose a women’s magazine, Asszonyok, which existed from 1945 to 1949, to help deliver its propaganda messages. This article also discusses examples of fashion communication in Asszonyok, with special focus on shoes, to show that the Communist Party regime in Hungary used sartorial symbolism as a primary tool of political persuasion aimed at women.

Law is an instrument by which political power is exercised and protected. Moreover the emphasis of the instrumental use of law often assumes or implies that the state is able to achieve its goals. Law, through its enforcement, fulfils the goal of social control. Under the guise of efforts to preserve morality and order, authoritarian regimes often apply the strangest of laws and regulations. In Greece, the General Theodoros Pangalos during his dictatorship (1925–1926) applied a regulation in order to control the length of women’s skirts. Much to the astonishment of the Greek urban society – and to the content of the seamstresses – on 1 December 1925 it was announced that it would be forbidden for all women, when in public, to wear skirts with hemlines that would deviate from the ground more than 30 centimetres! Otherwise, the offenders would be prosecuted. What were the reasons behind the application of this regulation? How did it circumvent civil and social rights? How was it received by the public? How is fashion related to the freedom of expression and how do fashion trends move from being merely objectionable to illegal? These are the main questions that this article will try to answer.

This article was developed from the project ‘Valuing Norwegian Wool’ initiated by the Norwegian National Institute for Consumer Research to generate knowledge on how wool can contribute to sustainable textile consumption, and how value creation can be increased in the Norwegian wool industry. The article will compare consumer perceptions, attitudes, practices and knowledge concerning wool as a material and as garments in Norway and in the United Kingdom, through a case study of wardrobes owned by six middle-class families. The aim is to generate knowledge about the diverse web of aspects that influence consumption of woollen garments. The wardrobe study as a method aims to include the materiality of garments in clothes research in a more direct way. Analysing the materiality in connection with the social and cultural aspects of clothes gives us a better understanding of the relations between materiality and practice.

Death Becomes Her: A Century of Mourning Attire, New York, 21 October 2014–1 February 2015