Critical Studies in Fashion & Beauty - Volume 12, Issue 2, 2021

In this introduction to the 12.2 issue of Critical Studies in Fashion & Beauty, the editors preview and consider several crisscrossing themes across the articles and reviews: affect, the body and gender, as well as class, race, nationality and other subject positions. The articles and reviews also represent a range of places and times. Diversity and heterogeneity of themes and objects of enquiry are distinctive characteristics of critical fashion studies today. The crisscrossing of themes reflects an equal amount of crisscrossing of theories, methodologies and epistemologies in our highly interdisciplinary field. Crisscrossing can be described as intersecting paths that diverge in different directions at each crossroad or intersection. Imagine for example an irregular embroidery cross-stitch pattern: while emphasizing intersections, there may be differences in the lengths of the stitches and the ways in which they are arranged. The cross-stitches may be shaped in nonlinear formats, even more so when they are not so tidy and – instead – are random, abstract or ambiguous. The editors argue that the importance of ambiguity has long been a theme in critical fashion studies.

Fashion enchants, engrosses, caresses, itches, restrains, liberates, enfolds, reveals, protects and provokes. This article researches fashion’s ability to affect, and vice versa, how humans are affected by fashion. The first part introduces the main tenets of affect theory, while the second part of the article focuses on the pragmatics of affective method. We understand affect as both an autonomous force and a neurobiological bodily response to a trigger that offsets feelings and emotions. To practically engage with affective experiences and the bodily sensations, feelings and emotions they evoke, we use Laura U. Marks’s affective analysis as a a method. We describe our experiments with this affective method using two case studies: a couture dress designed by Dutch fashion designer Jan Taminiau and a simple T-shirt produced by fast fashion giant Primark. The case studies illustrate the affective qualities of fashion by researching embodied responses, feelings and emotions. The affective method aims to circumvent representation by focusing on the body and how it relates to what fashion can ‘do’. It also allows for a sustained focus on the materiality of the fashion object itself. The article argues that affective method is a valuable and compelling tool that can break open material fashion research, by foregrounding the embodied experiences, feelings and emotions that play a key role in our relationship with fashion.

This photo essay explores the intersections of gender, fatness and fashion through an innovative and evocative arts-based methodology involving collaboratively constructed macro, or close-up, photographs, portraits and garment images. With these images, we can examine people’s experiences at the intersections of fat and gender through one of the most visible and embodied ways by which we construct and resist dominant narratives about these subject positions: fashion and self-fashioning. The Sizing Up Gender project engaged twelve self-identified cis-gender, trans, non-binary and two-spirit fat people across diverse race, class and other subject positions. Their narratives disrupt many dominant understandings of fat bodies and fashion and introduce a joyfulness to the story of dressing fat bodies that has been sorely neglected. We connect these feelings of joy to the concept of fabulousness, and consider how our participants’ experiences of joy and risk are not only due to genders, races and sexualities but also to how these identities intersect with their fat embodiments, fatphobia and weight stigma. The images presented here, particularly the macro photographs, force us to look more closely at the subject matter at hand and introduce a visual fabulousness of their own, a fabulousness that is rarely afforded to fat bodies.

Review of: Crossing Gender Boundaries: Fashion to Create, Disrupt and Transcend, Andrew Reilly and Ben Barry (eds) (2020)

Bristol: Intellect Ltd, 225 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-78938-153-5, h/bk, $106.50