Fashion, Style & Popular Culture - 3: The Reviews Issue, Jul 2023

The research analyses the challenges and opportunities that virtual reality has initiated for the communication of fashion collections since the COVID-19 pandemic began in 2020. It focuses on a case study of the work of the Accidental Cutting fashion brand, who have pioneered the presentation of virtual fashion collections at London Fashion Week since September 2020. The brand has explored new ways to promote and market their collections investigating a diverse use of virtual reality. The study also explores how this technology has subsequently become linked to different phases involved in the design and manufacture of the brand’s clothes. The methodological approach is qualitative and focuses on the auto-ethnographic reflections of the Accidental Cutting designer. These consider the challenges, technical and material difficulties, as well as opportunities in the global context of fashion, which the brand had to face when showing their virtual collections amid the restrictions imposed by COVID-19. The research also considers the future direction for the use of virtual reality in global fashion communication within a post pandemic world.

This study examines the identity transformation among the Chinese young consumers who resided in Shanghai, China. The living environment has heralded an era of multiple market ideologies infusing western cosmopolitanism into Chinese traditions. Thus, in this article, we examine how the Chinese youngsters deal with a diversity of symbols to construct the ‘New Chinese’ cosmopolitan identity by (1) redefining their modern and cosmopolitan selves through the exploitation of new market symbols; (2) resisting stereotypical Chinese imageries through consistent or temporal rebellious acts; and (3) reforming the ‘Chinese’ selves through collective efforts. The findings yielded contribute to the current discussions of global consumer culture and symbolic consumption by illustrating the ethnocentric symbolic interaction among young Chinese consumers and market symbols in emerging economies like China.

From its earliest roots, art was used to codify and communicate what is fashionable, powerful and luxurious. Recently, however, through institutional mega art projects like the Fondation LV and the Fondazione Prada, fashion seeks not just to legitimize itself, but to position itself as patron-cum-collaborator. Up until now the art world has been happy to take the money, but has been ambivalent towards the commercialization that co-branding brings. However, the highest grossing exhibits at hallowed cultural institutions – like the McQueen retrospective at the Met – have been fashion based. It seems, as of late, the fashion industry has gone past sponsorship and now seems to be colonizing the environs of the art world itself. These new imbrications hold significance for a broad range of related topics such as creative appropriation, feminist theory, and issues of gendered representation and power. As such, the politics of criteria for inclusion and collection must now become a necessary aspect of the dialogue within fashion, art and museum studies, and the thinking that situates them as discrete entities that exist within autonomous domains irrelative to each other also needs to be challenged. This article explores the cartography between autonomous art culture, fashion marketing, and fashion exhibition, and the increased blurring of their overlapping borders. It also looks at the commercialization of the museum and fine art institutional domain.

Perhaps no artefact is as evocative of temporality (i.e. the lived experience of time), as fashion and, arguably, no other period in history represents such a marked change in our notions about the relationship between the two as the 1960s did. In contrast to the Platonic-Apollonian fashion ideals of the 1950s, as exemplified by Dior’s New Look, the mod and the hippy came to represent competing bodily ideals. Their Dionysian fashions aestheticized time in three complementary ways: first, the celebration of the now, with its emphasis on the ephemeral, the physically pleasurable and the situated body in motion; second, the re-appropriation of the past, which involved the postmodern rejection or subversion of grand historical narratives that privileged certain iterations of race, class and gender and touted imperialism and cultural hegemony; and third, a utopian optimism about the future based on a belief in the increased possibilities of individual human potential as well as the prospect of societal transformation into a post-bellum, post-racial, post-classist, post-gender ‘Age of Aquarius’. These aesthetic values had political implications. Although the most radical of street fashions was worn by comparatively few 1960s youth, the deeper reasons why they came to be viewed with suspicion and outright anger were not so much due to particular styles, but rather what they revealed about our changing relationships to temporality and the postmodern fracturing of metanarratives concerning the proper existential comportment towards tradition and change, while laying the symbolic groundwork for what would later be referred to as the ‘culture wars’ in popular media.

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, p/bk, $50.00

Review of: Fashion, Women and Power: The Politics of Dress, Denise N. Rall (ed.) (2022)

Bristol: Intellect Ltd., 235 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-78938-461-1, p/bk, £22.00/$29.99

Review of: L.A. Chic: A Locational History of Los Angeles Fashion, Susan Ingram and Markus Reisenleitner (2018)

Bristol: Intellect Ltd., 219 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-78320-934-7, p/bk, $45.00

ISBN 978-1-78320-935-4, ePUB, $34.90

ISBN 978-1-78320-936-1, e-book, $34.90

Review of: Skirts: Fashioning Modern Femininity in the Twentieth Century, Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell (2022)

New York: St. Martin’s Press, 272 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-25027-579-0, h/bk, $28.99

Review of: Some Wear Leather, Some Wear Lace: The Worldwide Compendium of Postpunk and Goth in the 1980s, Andi Harriman and Marloes Bontje (2014)

Bristol: Intellect Ltd., 216 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-78320-352-9, p/bk, $35.00

ISBN 978-1-78320-353-6, e-book, $31.00

Review of: Fashion Knowledge: Theories, Methods, Practices and Politics, Elke Gaugele and Monica Titton (eds) (2022)

Bristol: Intellect Ltd., 200 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-78938-768-1, p/bk, $50.00

Review of: Fashioning Spain: From Mantillas to Rosalia, Francisco Fernández de Alba and Marcela T. Garcés (eds) (2021)

London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 224 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-35016-926-5, h/bk, $39.95

Review of: Unfolding the Past, Elizabeth Wilson (2022)

London, New York and Dublin: Bloomsbury Visual Arts Publishing, 296 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-3502-3259-4, h/bk, $27.00

ISBN 978-1-3502-3260-0, e-book, $24.30

Review of: Seamlessness: Making and (Un)Knowing in Fashion Practice, Yeseung Lee (2016)

Bristol: Intellect Ltd., 215 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-78320-642-1, p/bk, $57.81

ISBN 978-1-78320-644-5, ePUB, $51.82

ISBN 978-1-68320-643-8, e-book, $51.82

Review of: Masks: Bowie and Artists of Artifice, James Curcio (ed.) (2020)

Bristol: Intellect Ltd., 278 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-78938-108-5, p/bk, $40.00

Review of: Cultural Appropriation in Fashion and Entertainment, Yuniya Kawamura and Jung-Whan Marc de Jong (2021)

London and New York: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 218 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-35017-055-1, p/bk, $20.96

ISBN 978-1-3501-7054-4, h/bk, $63.00

ISBN 978-1-3501-7058-2, ePUB, $16.17

ISBN 978-1-3501-7056-8, e-book, $16.17