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- Volume 5, Issue 1, 2014
Critical Studies in Fashion & Beauty - Volume 5, Issue 1, 2014
Volume 5, Issue 1, 2014
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‘It’s kind of where the shoe gets you to I suppose’: Materializing identity with footwear
More LessAbstractThrough their narrative incorporation in fairytales, song lyrics, in movies and on television shoes have become a ‘loaded device’ (Pine, 2006: 353) recycled as metonymy for the wearer or as metaphor for experience. Due to such extensive representation this article argues that they have become, in a sense, invisible. In existing academic literature we have tended to see the message rather than the shoe and we become blind to what Miller describes as the ‘humility’ of the shoe as a ‘thing’ (Miller 2005: 5). This neglect of the materiality of the shoe itself obscures the highly nuanced and subjective experiences of the wearer. As consumers/wearers, we might fully understand – even aspire to – the cultural connotations of a particular pair of shoes, yet this does not mean we will feel socially comfortable wearing them. Using empirical data gathered from wearers of the culturally significant Clarks Originals brand, this article reveals the co-constitutive relationship between the social identity of the wearer and that of the shoe. By focusing on the materiality of objects, bodies and environments we can overcome subject-object dualisms and really ‘see’ shoes in terms of the role they and their meanings play in a process of identification, transformation and cultural embodiment.
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Materializing fashion: Designers, materials, ideas and the creation of designer shoes
More LessAbstractThe article discusses the findings from an extensive ethnographic study of contemporary British women’s shoe designers that explored what creativity in shoe design entails. This study profiled 23 shoe designers who create shoes for the high fashion industry. The objective of the study was to tease out how these designers go about creating shoes while at the same time revealing how they perceive and experience their creativity in relation to the commercial world of fashion in which they are engaged. The designers presented in the article are celebrated by the fashion press and buyers internationally as creators of fashion. While the fashion industry enables these designers to create new collections each season, an acceptance that they were creating, or influenced by, fashion was absent from their narratives. Instead, for them, design was defined by creative freedom, expression and personal taste and through the materiality of their creations they were able to present their self-identities. This article presents shoe design as a creative process where materials are significant inspirational stimuli for each designer. Their selection of materials was often triggered by personal emotive reasons, as their sensory, tactile engagements with them would bring forth ideas for particular designs. They narrated creativity as a personal and emotional experience, distinct from fashion, yet each season their designs were commercialized as fashion and were proclaimed by fashion buyers, and other media agents, to be ‘on trend’ in terms of colours, materials and silhouettes. The article explores this paradox between the shoe designers’ desire to be creatively free and their necessary relationship to the commerciality of the fashion industry, examining how fashion works by drawing out the relationship between fashion’s different layers of design, materiality, creativity and commerciality.
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Wool is a knitted fabric that itches, isn’t it?
Authors: Marie Hebrok and Ingun Grimstad KleppAbstractIn this article we explore in what ways consumers preconceptions of wool influence their ability to recognize it as a fabric. Do we know that it is wool because it itches, or, conversely, does it itch because we think that it is wool? The analysis builds on three different methods; wardrobe studies, sample tests and interviews, in order to explore both informants’ visual senses, and also applied tactile senses. It aims to bring together social science and textile technology methodologies and understanding in order to understand the properties of wool. It does this through adopting a multisensory understanding of the material. The research aimed to explore the associations with and experiences of wearing wool. This, we argue is as important as the senses in the process of identifying woollen fibres. The research found that the strongest influences in fabric identification were: perceptions of use, fabric type and fibres, colour, structure patterns and the ‘feel’ of the fabric.
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Chameleon hair: How hair’s materiality affects its fashionability
By Helen HolmesAbstractThis article seeks to explore the changeable materiality of hair. Drawing upon the archaeological concept of the palimpsest, as an inimitable material record, it illuminates how hair’s chameleon abilities are the foundation upon which the contemporary hair fashion industry resides. As Nigel Thrift notes, hair ‘is the easiest part of the body to alter. It grows so must be cut’. However, paradoxically, it is hair’s very materiality that also inhibits its conformity to certain fashions. While hair may appear to have chameleon materiality, it has multiple temporalities. And as this article argues, hair is simultaneously changing and changed, but it displays constant features.
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Fashioning authentic selves: Second-hand clothing and the materialization of enduring values
More LessAbstractFashion is often conflated with transience and novelty, demanding that individuals update themselves regularly in keeping with these changes. In this article, however, I argue that fashion is a way for individuals to articulate an enduring sense of self amid life’s changes. Based on material values evident in second-hand clothing, individuals draw parallels between themselves and the clothes, where old clothes objectify their personal values, of who they are, who they were or who they aspired to be, creating what I call, fashion-as-authenticity. Through old clothing, individuals access selective and imagined realities of different times to authenticate the self and its transformation throughout the course of their lives.
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Wearing in memory: Materiality and oral histories of dress
More LessAbstractThis article considers materiality in relation to memories of dress and explores why women remember the materiality of clothes they no longer wear or even no longer own. The focus is on two historical case studies of specific garments collected through primary interviews undertaken as part of my doctoral research. One, a black silk-velvet dress, belonged to Mary who had kept the skirt of the garment, with its signs of wear and physical material traces of use. It was bound up with memories of her late brother, who paid for the dress before his death on active service in World War II, and her late husband and their early lives together. Doris’ sister made the other dress for her 21st birthday in 1942. Doris had not kept this cotton-organdie dress, but this decision was full of regret. In her case, retaining memories of the materiality of the garment and the occasion when it was first worn had become a substitute for the garment itself. Both oral histories reveal the significance of materiality at the time a garment is worn and in how dress wears in and on our memories.
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Fashion acoustics: Synthesizing wearable electronics and digital musical instruments for performance
More LessAbstractThis article investigates the blending of fashion objects and new musical interfaces in order to create acoustic fashion objects. We discuss employing performance research as the main artistic concept for developing new patterns of movement with technology. A series of three workshop processes (treated as case studies) resulted in both new performance works and new acoustic fashion objects designed as part of these works.
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Book Reports
By Diana CraneAbstractFashion and Orientalism: Dress, Textiles and Culture from the 17th Century to the 21st Century, Adam Geczy (2013) London: Bloomsbury, (255 pp.) 978 1 84788 599 9 PB, $34.95
The Chinese Fashion Industry: An Ethnographic Approach, Jianhua Jhao (2013) London: Bloomsbury, (197 pp.) 9781 84788 935 5 (PB), $34.99
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New York, Paris: Schiaparelli, Prada, Louis Vuitton and Marc Jacobs
Authors: J. Emanuel Raymundo and Christina H. MoonAbstractFashion is an individual undertaking and a collaborative effort woven together across distance and time. This article reviews two fashion exhibitions: ‘Schiaparelli and Prada: Impossible Conversations’ at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art from 10 May to 19 August 2012, and ‘Louis Vuitton–Marc Jacobs’ at Paris’ Les Arts Decoratifs from 9 March to 16 September 2012. Each exhibition threaded one contemporary designer with a designer and a fashion forebear. The reviews are, in the spirit of the fashion exhibitions they discuss, individual yet collaborative undertakings.
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