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- Volume 8, Issue 1, 2017
Critical Studies in Fashion & Beauty - Volume 8, Issue 1, 2017
Volume 8, Issue 1, 2017
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The body, the garment and the Kantian sublime in fashion
More LessAbstractThis article concerns the ways in which Kant’s account of the sublime may be used to explain fashion. It uses examples from designer Rei Kawakubo and theorist Elizabeth Wilson to introduce the argument that our everyday experiences of the body, the garment and fashion are actually experiences of the sublime. In order to make this argument, the article places these experiences in a western philosophical tradition by considering Hegel’s early-nineteenth-century account of the relation between the garment and the body. The article then argues that Roland Barthes’s account of Erté’s alphabet-drawings is a critique of Hegel and Wilson, and that it presupposes Kant’s idea of the sublime. The article provides an account of Kant’s sublime in the Critique of Judgement, written in 1790, relating it back to his account of the schematism in the Critique of Pure Reason (written in 1781). The conclusion is that the experience of the sublime, of the inadequacy that is necessarily involved in the application of concepts to intuitions or in the subsumption of intuitions under concepts, is found in all experience and thus that fashion is always constituted by the experience of the sublime.
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High fashion or high fascism? A Kantian analysis of aesthetics, beauty, genius, power and politics
More LessAbstractThis article explores the response of the fashion world to an incident involving John Galliano. This incident is used as a case study to examine issues about beauty and fashion, the politics of aesthetics, the philosophy of human affairs and the relationships between morality and good citizenship. It seeks to question some conceptions of beauty that circulate within the world of haute couture and also to problematize the use of the term ‘genius’ when this is divorced from any consideration of moral acceptability. Two philosophical works are used to help with this task: Immanuel Kant’s ([1790] 2000) Critique of the Power of Judgment, and Hannah Arendt’s (1992) Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy. In exploring whether individuals can be expected to exhibit an acceptable moral condition under a ‘good constitution’, the Galliano incident prompts, in complex ways, consideration of three things: ‘What constitutes a bad man?’, ‘What constitutes a good citizen?’ and ‘What constitutes a good state?’ Corollary questions include, ‘are “the beautiful” and “the good” related?’, and ‘should one who fails to show moral behaviour be considered a genius’?
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Black women’s bodies and blackface in fashion magazines
More LessAbstractRace as an aesthetic has been a contentious issue in the modelling industry since the early days of organized aesthetic labour, as black models straddle a tightrope between following a bourgeois, white ideal ‘look’ or highlighting their ‘exotic’ non-white features in order to stand out. Models may be the faces of fashion, yet photographers, editors, agents, art directors and stylists are the gatekeepers making the aesthetic choices and decisions. There have been strides forward in the fashion industry – on the runway, in publications and on social media – to celebrate diverse forms of beauty, including those that fall outside of the de facto standard. These efforts tend to confuse race with aesthetics, that is, with stereotypical racial styling of non-white models, and blackface is still prevalent in the most prestigious of fashion magazines.
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A look at ‘fishy drag’ and androgynous fashion: Exploring the border spaces beyond gender-normative deviance for the straight, cisgendered woman
Authors: Jacki Willson and Nicola McCartneyAbstractThis article seeks to re-explore and critique the current trend of androgyny in fashion and popular culture and the potential it may hold for gender-deviant dress and politics. In order to do this, it will discuss the way in which a popular version of male drag has monopolized a vision of gender subversion that has marginalized ‘straight’ cisgendered women’s transgressive challenge to gender norms. Although not misogynistic in itself, RuPaul’s Drag Race (Logo 2009–2017) brings to the surface the misogyny inherent in femininity – the performance underscores deeper asymmetrical power imbalances which are embedded in women’s daily lives. Recent unisex fashion collections with their subsequent campaigns have sought to address this imbalance; however, this is not a problem with an easy fix. This article looks at the way in which particular performers such as Grace Jones and Harnaam Kaur have ad(dressed) their gender resistance without camouflaging and thus losing sight of a feminist history of gender inequality which still strongly resonates.
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Book Review
More LessAbstractThe Dressmaker of Dachau, Mary Chamberlain (2016), London: The Borough Press. Paperback edition, 341 pp, ISBN 978-0 -759155-8
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Exhibition Review
By Alla MyzelevAbstractThe Wax Museum: Approaching Celebrities, Haifa Museum of Art, Haifa, 18 February–19 August 2017
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