Fashion, Style & Popular Culture - 1-2: The Reviews Issue, Mar 2025

The fur and fur patterns of African animals were part of the fashion industry’s exoticization of Africa during the 1920s. Avant-garde interest in African sculpture, African textiles and African jewellery blended with the popularity of jazz music played by African Americans to create a market for fashionable clothing inspired by Africa. Using fur from African animals, and textile prints and embroideries imitating fur patterns, reflected the most consistent interest in Africa. African safaris, world fairs and colonial expositions displaying African animals contributed to African exoticism. Books for children, textile designs illustrating African elephants and examples of fabric dyed colours called ‘lioness’ were some of the resulting consumer products. The graphic fur patterns of leopards, giraffes and zebras perfectly suited the bold geometric aesthetics of the Arts Modernes design style, while the fringe-like quality of monkey fur met the trend requirements for fringed evening wear. Zebra fur and patterns played a feminizing role in mediating the increasingly masculine dress and activities for women. The graphic black-and-white stripes linked the wearer to the exotics and adventure of Africa, while also reflecting contemporary design aesthetics and the hard-edged, chaotic American city. Because the zebra stripe originates on the fur of a peaceful prey animal, the pattern was perceived as graceful and feminine. For the modern women who wanted to participate in the adventures of the era, wearing zebra stripes tempered the interpretation of her wild life in the American urban jungle without compromising her femininity.

African animal fur patterns were part of the flapper’s wardrobe. Fur trade publications and the fashion press specifically linked leopard to flapper fashion. Wearing leopard fur connected the modern woman to the wilds of jazz dance and sexual promiscuity for which she was known. Celebrity flappers like Nancy Cunard wore leopard. Illustrators like John Held Jr. made giraffe fur patterns part of this flapper look, though giraffe was short-lived and had more aristocratic and graceful connotations than leopard. African leopard, giraffe, gazelle and zebra were all linked to the new clothing category called sportswear. These furs were sometimes called jungle furs to exoticize their origins in Africa and connect them to the popularity of jazz, ‘jungle’ music. The fur patterns eventually became part of the exotic pyjama, thus promoting an early form of sportswear pant being worn outside the home for the beach by the end of the twenties.

Ann Duskin Lincoln, the founder of the Philadelphia specialty shop Nan Duskin, dominated Philadelphia retail for decades and played a significant role in the development of American fashion. At its peak, Nan Duskin was one of the leaders of American retail, and its founder, Mrs Lincoln, was internationally recognized for her fashion instincts and was one of the most respected, feared, and loved retailers in the business. This article will focus on Mrs Lincoln and Nan Duskin from 1927 to 1965, a transformative period for American fashion. It will explore the unique social role of the women’s specialty shop in American retail during the first half of the twentieth century and the critical role they had in the promotion and development of American fashion. Exemplary in every aspect, Mrs Lincoln’s career is representative of the many independent female retailers that flourished in the first half of the twentieth century.

This article will suggest that the American sportswear style reflects the unique historical and cultural influences on American dress from the birth of the new democratic nation in the eighteenth century to the dominance of New York City’s ready-to-wear industry in the 1950s. Focusing on the key decades of the 1930s and 1940s, this article will explore the marketing campaign of Dorothy Shaver, vice-president of the luxury retailer Lord & Taylor, who in 1932 coined the phrase ‘the American Look’ to promote American fashion designers’ collections. The legacy of sportswear designer Claire McCardell, arguably the best known of the New York-based ready-to-wear designers will be examined. McCardell’s combination of nostalgic American prairie style with the use of everyday workwear fabrics of cotton plaid, denim, wool and jersey created an unpretentious casual American style based on comfort, ease and flexibility, which is reflected today in the contemporary American ready-to-wear market. The article will maintain that the promotion of the American Look via photographic shoots, magazines, advertisements, visual merchandising, exhibition and film influenced the style and taste of dress that the female American body ought to ‘fit into’. This style, it will be argued, encouraged the development of a cultural memory of American dress by establishing a material link between national identity and clothing.

Visual communication today is often characterized as more complex and multi-dimensional than in the past, and it is often argued that we are separated from our past by a greater range of visual concepts, imaginings and technologies that have never before been dreamed of. But such a conceit does not withstand a critical interrogation; moreover, if it were unchallenged then it would lead to an underestimation of the enduring human capacity for nuance and comprehension, for both understanding and misunderstanding one another. The thoughtful exhibition of Micaela de Vivero’s art underscores the hazards of stipulating a conceptual and material gap between the cultural and visual landscape of then and now, and by extension the autonomy and richness of past cultures obscured or annihilated as a part of the colonial endeavour. These ideas are beautifully drawn out and elegantly captured in a large, deeply researched exhibition by Micaela de Vivero, an Andean artist, who makes sculpture using often non-traditional sculptural materials, such as hand-dyed sisal cord and wool, hand-made paper, pig intestines, and gold and silver leaf. Her work draws on decolonial theory and in this exhibition specifically the work of a remarkable letter written around 1600 by Guaman Poma, an Andean scholar, to reveal unprecedented and still unattainable complexities in (visual) communication.

In reaction to the climate crisis, we have seen the emergence of environmental fashion trends that seek to limit energy use and cut emissions, with the aim of building sustainability. The provocation to design in concert with our biosphere is driving fashion designers to renegotiate our relationship with living systems in the quest for innovative ecological design models. This article explores the transformative coupling of fungi fabric and fashion. It considers how fashion brands and designers might develop new languages by bringing fungi’s root intelligence into wearable forms. A body of remarkable experiments has shown that fungi engage in decision-making, are capable of learning and possess short-term memory. The intelligence of the fungal ecosystem and its ability to repair damage in its own structure brings new possibilities to the idea of a ‘smart’ textile. Preserving these active qualities in a textile raises challenges for fashion brands and consumers about how to store the garments and whether we would need to feed our wardrobe of the future to keep it alive. If use of mycelium in fashion is to progress beyond the Petri dish or catwalk novelty, challenges of consistency and scale need to be addressed. Far from the ‘perfect cure’, fungi materials raise questions about their eco-credentials, finishing treatments and disposability, and the ethics of working with living organisms. With a rising experimentation in bio-fabrics, I suggest the need for a critical discourse of materials that aims to promote new questions and scholarship on the intersections between body and botany, decomposition and drapery, and engineering and ecosystems.

Review of: Wholesale Couture: London and Beyond, 1930–1970, Liz Tregenza (2023)

London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 236 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-35024-586-0, h/bk, $115.00

Review of: The Future of Clothing: Will We Wear Suits on Mars?, Simone Achermann and Stephan Sigrist (2023)

London and New York: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 175 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-35013-859-9, p/bk, $27.00

Review of: Gastrofashion: From Haute Cuisine to Haute Couture, Adam Geczy and Vicki Karaminas (2022)

New York: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 248 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-35014-750-8, p/bk, $36.95

Review of: Fashion Education: The Systemic Revolution, Ben Barry and Deborah A. Christel (eds) (2023)

Bristol: Intellect, 352 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-78938-680-6, p/bk, $47.95

Review of: Memories of Dress: Recollections of Material Identities, Alison Slater, Susan Atkin and Elizabeth Kealy-Morris (eds) (2023)

London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 258 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-35015-379-0, h/bk, £85

Review of: Islamicate Textiles: Fashion, Fabric, and Ritual, Faegheh Shirazi (2023)

London, New York and Dublin: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 197 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-35029-123-2, h/bk, $115.00

Review of: Rei Kawakubo: For and against Fashion, Rex Butler (ed.) (2022)

London and New York: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 236 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-35011-822-5, h/bk, $115.00

Review of: Fashion-ology: Fashion Studies in the Postmodern Digital Era, Yuniya Kawamura (2023)

London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 182 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-35033-186-0, p/bk, $29.95