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- Volume 10, Issue 2, 2023
Critical Studies in Men's Fashion - Atmospheres, Dec 2023
Atmospheres, Dec 2023
- Editorial
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Editorial
More LessThis special issue explores the multifaceted dimensions of men’s fashion, examining its intricacies through the lens of atmospheres. Atmospheres serve a dual role, functioning as a contextual frame that shapes men’s fashion and analytical frameworks that unify diverse influences on masculine dress. Articles within the issue explore the atmospheres of men’s fashion across various settings, including en plein air painting, online avatars, music videos, performative personas in popular music, raves and military uniforms. Employing historical, visual, textual, ethnographic and practice-led approaches, these investigations shed light on the interplay of spatial, bodily and affective dimensions of fashion. Atmospheres become a bridge, addressing the gap between these dimensions and providing a generative notion to understand interdependent interactions within masculine fashion contexts. Consequently, the issue underscores the significance of men’s fashion as a carrier of social life within broader socio-cultural, technological and political assemblages. By scrutinizing specific instantiations of men’s fashion, the special issue forges connections between typically distinct elements in the field, emphasizing the interdependence of individuals, equipment, technologies, practices and environments.
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- Articles
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En plein air: Light, space and fashion in Filippo de Pisis’s aesthetics
More LessThis article addresses the concept of en plein air regarding men’s fashion in early twentieth-century Italy. The act of painting outdoors has been addressed at length in the field of art history as one of the most radical practices of nineteenth-century avantgardes. It focused on the changing appearance of light and weather conditions, as in the case of the renowned French Impressionist painters, who often represented women and their clothing in the natural environment. However, en plein air can also provide an opportunity to reframe men’s fashion in its relationship with the environment. The Italian painter and dandy Filippo de Pisis (1896–56) relied on en plein air to constitute his peculiar vision of ‘pictorial elegance’, connecting painting skills with the experience of wearing clothes in open spaces, for instance, during a stroll in the Mediterranean sunshine. This article analyses de Pisis’s artworks and writings on male elegance and its pictorial qualities, aiming to explore the under-investigated invisibility of men’s fashion in the early twentieth century. By doing so, it challenges the misogyny of the antifashion rhetoric of Modernist aesthetics. The case of de Pisis is particularly interesting in this regard because it provides an illuminating pictorial and textual affective interpretation of the interdependences between men’s bodies, the colours and fabrics of their clothes and the qualities of the open-air environment in which they were experienced. This contribution intends to shed light on the concept of ‘pictorial elegance’ that was for de Pisis a queer, destabilizing and poetic transfiguration of masculinity in the context of European Modernism.
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Imagined possibilities and bodily feelings embedded in personal fashion archives
More LessThis article examines the significance of the body and its sensory and embodied aspects associated with a historical milieu and set of practices associated with ‘rave’ subculture and its relationship to fashion creativity. It focuses on a personal fashion archive that documents menswear designed in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Using an autoethnographic approach, the study investigates how the design of the garments in the archive was shaped by ways of experiencing and understanding the body that integrated the embodied experiences of moving and dancing with electronic music, the embodied experience of dressing, and the embodied experiences of designing men’s fashion in the years that followed. While rave and electronic dance music cultures received considerable scholarly attention in the mid- to late 1990s, less attention was devoted to men’s fashion and the interaction between fashion design, embodied experience and the rave sensoria. Moreover, while this study lays at the intersection rave and electronic dance music culture, fashion and design, all of which are understood to have European and North American origins, the article considers the way those practices took a unique shape within an Australian context. The contribution aims to provide insight into fashion as part of situated and embodied practices, that take place in local milieus, and the way fashion creativity can be understood not as surface ‘ripples’ moving out from global fashion centres or trickle-down versions of ‘authentic’ fashion developed elsewhere, but as fashion creativity, shaped by global forces, energies, and technologies, and embodied and enacted via local manifestations.
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From Caftan King to Peacock Pasha: Demis Roussos and Orientalist decadence in men’s fashion and European popular culture, 1968–80
More LessThe Greek-Egyptian singer Artemios Ventouris (Demis) Roussos (1946–2015) was a global superstar in the 1970s, selling more than 60 million albums. Roussos’s success was built on his hard work, talent and ability to craft a sensual, comforting, caftan-clad performance persona that tapped into the 1970s zeitgeist. Scholarship to date has considered the decadence of Orientalism and caftans in fashion, including their importance in the so-called ‘Peacock Revolution’ of menswear. It has also considered how Roussos used a nostalgia linked to warm, sunny package holidays – a new European phenomenon in the 1970s – within his songs to great commercial success. Less attention, however, has been paid to how Roussos used the materialism and Orientalist symbolism of his luxurious caftans with his voice, hirsuteness and embonpoint to create the seductive, sensual atmosphere that was central to his fame and offered his fans an alternative to dominant images of 1970s male rock stars. This article also examines how wearing caftans allowed Roussos to create his ‘pasha’ persona, a hypermasculine figure associated with decadent Orientalist stereotypes of the harems and palaces of the mythical East. Roussos’s ‘pasha’ image extended beyond the stage and his gargantuan appetites for food and the trappings of luxury were also central to recreating the atmosphere of decadence he remembered from his Egyptian childhood. This article thus traces how, as Roussos’s fame and girth expanded, he made caftans his trademark, blending an Orientalist, libertine style of living and dress that seduced his fans and expressed the era’s, and his own, desires for excesses that transgressed bourgeois notions of restrained, good taste.
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Modding masculinities: Video game glitches and transcending gendered dress
Authors: Daniel Drak and Ben BarryGaming avatars are often confined to a predetermined set of bodies, identities and clothing options that reinforce gender norms. In response, players have participated in modifying the existing bodies and clothing choices available for their avatars to represent their experiences. This article draws on concepts of the glitch and antigender fashion to engage in a textual analysis of The Sims 4. We explore how modifications for avatars’ appearance and clothing create spaces for players to transcend dominant notions of masculinity and produce a variety of gendered-dressed embodiments. Our analysis understands video games as atmospheres and modifications as glitches that expand the gendered possibilities within virtual worlds. However, the expansion of masculinities in The Sims 4 relies on the labour of players from marginalized communities and, as such, reaffirms gender power structures. Our article introduces video games as sites where players construct, negotiate and subvert dressed masculine embodiments.
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Uniform-undone: A study in the repurposing of military attire through history and in experimental practice
Authors: Tricia Crivellaro and Anthony LunguThis article reports on a practice-led research project focusing on military attire as both a subject and an agent of change. An historical account situates the origins of modern military attire within the emergent modern state during the nineteenth century, and then examines its subsequent role as part of the project to create a ‘new man’ in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. This is followed by a critical discussion of the decoupling of military attire from its associations with the institutions of state and warfare during the Vietnam War – where fatigues entered the popular atmosphere as casual attire that was variously subversive, countercultural and aesthetic in nature. Employing the MA-1 bomber jacket and camouflage as illustrative examples, the article then highlights the continued repurposing of military attire and its concomitant commoditization. The practice-led research employs object-based research, speculative artistic methodologies and various garment-making techniques in the production of a novel ‘military’ garment that explores the symbolism of military uniforms and critiques their traditional concept as utilitarian combat wear. The material outcomes interrogate linkages between military attire and notions of masculinity, class and gender identity. The research project further attempts to speculate on how military attire may be repurposed within the atmosphere of the twenty-first century – one that contemplates new forms of identity and other challenges that are responsive to contemporary circumstances.
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A rumour from ground control: Time, space and fashioned gender identity in David Bowie’s ‘Ashes to Ashes’
By Ailsa WeaverThis article aims to identify the fashioned ‘look’ of sound, and the sound of a fashion look, by investigating a significant precedent in the early music video canon: ‘Ashes to Ashes’ (1980), co-directed by David Mallet and David Bowie. The article analyses the three characters that Bowie performs in the video in recognition of three recurring concerns of fashion theory: time, space and masculine sartorial identity. The character of Pierrot is considered through understandings of modernity and postmodernity, including the reciprocal influence of the nostalgic-futurist ‘New Romantic’ movement. The character of Major Tom is evaluated with regard to different understandings of ‘space’ in the music video. Finally, a third persona, a man who inhabits the atmosphere of a padded cell, is looked at in association with Bowie’s legacy in contemporary masculine fashion.
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