Critical Studies in Fashion & Beauty - Volume 1, Issue 2, 2010

High street fashion is an important industry in economic as well as aesthetic and cultural terms. Fashions not only provide a social language based on easily recognized, high-circulating items but they also generate massive wealth. These visual icons and images globalize human experience to a significant extent while, at the same time, remaining problematic to read. For example, how well-recognized and globally accepted are the meanings around images of a full red-lipsticked mouth, an unbuttoned pristine business shirt, or spiked multi-coloured hair The history of the visual suggests that every image has multiple readings; there is no essence to the image, no limits to its commentary, no reassuring boundaries restricting its suggestions. The image is ubiquitous, problematic and enduringly pleasurable, even as its meanings are tantalizingly concealed. A fascinating example is explored in this article of the ethno-methodological folly of the late 1960s, when a hormone pill-popping young man convinced a myopic medical team to undertake the desired surgical reassignment of his gender. The con was affected on the basis of a skilful and smooth gender-bending performance that rested on the persuasiveness of the unreliable image.

Fashion and identity are inextricably linked. Consumers throughout the ages have strategically deployed apparel and other self-expressive products to signal real and aspirational personas and to pursue hedonic exploration and fantasy. Often these transformations are entrusted to aesthetic professionals such as clothing designers, cosmeticians and photographers.

Today, new technological platforms enable even the amateur to create a myriad of identities as she navigates the evolving virtual environment some call The Metaverse. But this is by no means a one-way journey; in some cases cyber-spatial experiences also impact on real-world identity. This article explores the theoretical and practical ramifications of digital identity management as consumers in the form of avatar representations make the passage from the physical world to the virtual, and back again.

Building on the growing body of literature that examines the consumption of fashion and the construction of identity through clothing, this article uses data from in-depth interviews with ten women aged 52 to 75 to examine Russian immigrant women's experiences of fashion. Specifically, we explore the ways in which Russian immigrant women's clothing choices and attitudes towards fashion are framed by their socialization within Russian cultural values (which privilege feminine appearance), their assimilation into Canadian culture, their resistance to Canadian views of beauty and femininity, and their feelings about their aging bodies. Our findings reveal that Russian immigrant women's doing of gender, age, social class, and immigrant status are shaped by culturally and historically situated conceptions of femininity as well as by decisions to either assimilate into North American culture or to other the self as distinctively Russian.

What is the meaning of national fashion in a globalized world Having or not having a national fashion upon which to rely seems to matter more and more for the success of brands operating in the contemporary market. This is so despite and perhaps because of production being increasingly transnational. The following article investigates how the project of a distinctive Italian fashion identity (made in Italy) is produced through discursive formulations and industrial practices in China and in Italy. It explores the meaning of made in Italy based on the perceived reproduction of historical or imagined traditions.

Whilst the kimonoed woman is an unchanging stereotype of Japanese beauty, this article suggests that due to the interaction of kimono with the processes of globalization (technological and in terms of communication), the kimono continues to metamorphose to meet the needs of its fashionable, urban, contemporary wearers.

This article offers a critical analysis of the media discourse surrounding the Swedish diplomat Sverker strm's coming out as a gay man at the age of 87. Particular interest is devoted to his striking fashion choice of wearing a pair of oddly coloured socks, which highlighted his contradictory masculinity as well as the many inherent paradoxes of the closet. strm's red and green socks functioned as a means to express forbidden desires, to oppose normative expectations in a playful way and to grant the gay subject a presence in a world that is still very much structured by the logics of the closet. Moreover, his contradictory body language, coupled with his repeated affirmations that his coming out was a private issue, revealed a divided masculinity that was ideologically dependent on a pre-feminist understanding of gender and sexuality as private, that is to say non-political. The article argues that there was strong evidence to suggest that his coming out was in fact a tactical move in a political game, a move aimed to denounce and ridicule the Swedish Security Police (SPO), who, after decades of surveillance, refused to grant the diplomat access to its classified files on him.

The return of the absent body in the fashion museum: Dressing the body exhibition DHUB Museu Txtil i d'Indumentria, Barcelona, permanent exhibition