Critical Studies in Fashion & Beauty - Volume 4, Issue 1-2, 2013

Rural spaces have often been overlooked in contemporary fashion scholarship. Academic analysis of modernity has diminished the significance of the rural and has frequently kept separate the rural and the urban. The focus within scholarly study has tended towards an alliance between the ‘un-naturalness’ of the city and the ‘un-naturalness’ of fashion, informed by the (non-verbal) codes and conventions that define social and cultural meaning within urban centres. This article suggests that the discipline of fashion theory is currently limited by a metro-centric bias and proposes the ‘field as mall’ as an example of an alternative space of fashion. This proposition, which literally focuses upon open fields that are temporarily transformed into urban ‘mall-like’ spaces, disrupts the problematic construct of the rural–urban divide. Based on ethnographic ­fieldwork, this article presents a sociological analysis of retailing, consumption and the phenomenon of the ‘pop up’ shopping village at the Mitsubishi Motors Badminton Horse Trials in Gloucestershire, England. It is argued here that this event is positioned between the rural and the urban, complicating the familiar urban–rural divide by locating aspects of the urban within the rural and the rural within the urban. Furthermore, we contend that the discourses of fashion (from the products on sale through to the symbolic significance of the geographical setting in which this event takes place) evidenced at this site complicates rural and urban relationships. Thus we call here for a re-evaluation of the rural in, for and by fashion scholarship.

Individuals who do not neatly fit into the normative parameters of a given place generate new ways of expressing subjectivity and bridging self–other boundaries as well as ‘in-place’ and ‘out-of-place’ ways of knowing. In this article, based on interviews with 21 individuals who have been in and out of place in a small town in Oregon (Grants Pass), we explore each of the three concepts – fashion, ‘out’ and place – to identify the ways in which individuals experience various routes and locations through time and space.

In her introduction to this issue, Kaiser advances a perspective that highlights dimensions of place and time in a dynamic and non-stereotypical way. Rather than treating these dimensions as background factors in the architecture of interaction context, she critically unpacks the ways in which time and place impact individual and collective fashion meanings. In our article we draw on Kaiser’s focus by using ethnographic methods to investigate how fashion is ‘produced’ to convey identification with place, group and/or a temporary alliance in a rural community where landscape is constitutive of social configurations and the student population is always transient. To that end we replace the notion of fixed visual identities with phatic communities, which are ad hoc groupings sharing a cause or a circumstance (Tseëlon 2010). Next, we address the problem of how to preserve the meanings and looks of ad hoc fashions, which exist in a constant state of change. We apply the logic of phatic communities to the building of a museum collection, which has to meet the challenge of capturing a fleeting and evolving phenomenon without freezing it into fixed categories. Contrary to the logic of traditional museums, a museum documenting ongoing clothing changes invites a different mode of engagement: one that is participatory and interactive. Finally, our conception of the sartorial museum, which documents changing time in a particular place, replaces the notion of the museum as a ‘space of death’ with the notion of a ‘space of regeneration’. The regeneration is the recycling, which repositions clothes in a ‘second life’.

The article explores intersections among nostalgia, the circulation of images and temporalities of fashion. It traces shifting meanings of nostalgia from its spatial connotation as a diagnosis for homesickness to its temporal connotation as longing for the past. While homesickness became counterproductive to ideals of modernity, consumer culture became a key site for the processing of spatio-temporal longings – potentially associated with the production of ‘false’ memories. This article highlights how nostalgia and memory are dynamically configured and intimately bound up with the development of sociotechnical practices, mediation and commodification. Uses and experiences of nostalgia range from the idealization of the past to its demystification. A perspective on the current enactment of nostalgia through vintage dress and photography points to its potencies in embodied practice as performative exploration of the experiential dynamics of temporality and being/becoming in time.

The research objective with this article is to examine the role of age in granny chic. Granny chic is understood as a contemporary fashion phenomenon characterized as the celebration by younger consumers of elements that may generally be considered to belong to the realm of older women, such as grey hair, orthopaedic shoes, craft and old clothes. The article challenges the binary construction of ‘young’ versus ‘old’, which is based on a biogerontological model of aging as decline (Kriebernegg and Maierhofer 2013). It explores whether the rise of granny chic since the millennium suggests a move towards an ‘age-irrelevant society’ (Cole 1992: 241) with a rise in tolerance for age diversity. To that end, it draws on age and ageing theory to question whether the nature of age in ‘granny chic’ is less about chronological age and more about old age as a symbolic tool for negotiating social status among younger consumers. Examples are drawn from the fashion industry with special attention to fashion campaigns, fashion spreads in magazines and runway shows. In addition, examples of granny chic in food and leisure are referenced. This article is not about older women per se, but about the social paradox of celebrating the old, imperfect and out-dated in an age focused on newness and perfection. The study uses a narrative method for the study of ‘granny chic’ as a fashion phenomenon. It analyses the representation in images and texts in mainly American and British newspapers, magazines and blogs – from 2010 to 2012.

Theorizing gay men’s sartorial tastes as a distinguishing marker from heterosexual men has neglected the way midlife gay men differentiate themselves through self-presentation from other gay men and how they respond to ageing and gay ageism. Based on interviews with gay men living in Manchester and observation sessions in its ‘gay village’, I examine what midlife gay men’s body management practices say about the construction of ageing and the discourse of ageism in local gay culture. I focus mainly on moral claims to bodily authenticity, which differentiate midlife gay men from younger or older gay men and indicate the multidirectional operation of gay ageism. Claims to authentic midlife self-presentation and sexual citizenship work in three ways: first, through reproducing ageism, especially a reverse ageism; second, by introducing ambivalences that indicate negotiation with gay ageing and ageism; and third, using resources of ageing like ‘ageing capital’ and at times age-related ‘technologies of the self’, ageism is subverted by critiquing it and re-claiming the value of age.

This article traces the construction of the 1990s as a fashion category via written and visual representations in US Vogue, as an illustration of the uneasy relationship between the fashion system and temporality. In the pages of Vogue, the twentieth century’s tendency to reduce clothing styles to decade-specific categories culminated in a self-conscious questioning beginning in 1990 as to what that decade would look like, how it would break from the past, and how it would be remembered in the future. I examine fashion news and editorial pages from the debut, the midpoint and the conclusion of the 1990s, as well as an oft-reprinted 1992 editorial that has become a period touchstone: the ‘Grunge & glory’ editorial, which has acquired a wider cultural profile that speaks to the way a decade becomes rhetorically condensed to a few visual cues, a process only truly possible in retrospect. My analysis of the contents of the magazine is informed by four differing models of time presented by John Urry, Judy Attfield and Zygmunt Bauman, including postmodern ideas of time-space compression and the ‘eternal instant’. I seek to uncover what Vogue’s representation of itself on the eve of the millennium can tell us about commercial fashion’s hierarchy of commodifiable memory in which the ‘now’ and the long-ago past are valued far above the recent past.

Parcours Saint Germain, 16–30 October 2012, Saint Germain des Prés, Paris

Mannequin, Le Corps de la Mode (Models, the Body of Fashion), 16 February–19 May 2013, Cité de la Mode et du Design, Paris; and Stardust, 4 April–8 September 2013, Museo del Novecento, Milan, in collaboration with the Bank of America Merrill Lynch