Fashion, Style & Popular Culture - Volume 12, Issue 4, 2025

The fashion system fundamentally changed during the Industrial Revolution when the industry pivoted away from traditional craft-based production and towards mechanization and mass production. The design process, manufacturing operations, retail practices and marketing tactics of mass production contributed over time to the current climate crisis. Globally, the fashion system is acknowledged as an environmental and social emergency. Thus, the fashion system needs to get with the times. Fashion as a reflection of modernity needs to align with globally recognized social and environmental goals. Societal attachment to materialism and fashion consumption should be reconsidered. In this article we consider these challenges to propose a paradigm that breaks the fashion cycle and provides a framework for the role fashion producers and consumers should play in the twenty-first century.

Ankara and lace fabrics have been in use for some years by many tribes in Nigeria. These two local fabrics are dynamic and unique to Africa in general. Despite the uniqueness of these two fabrics, there is a dearth of in-depth study on them. This study presents a comparative analysis of the physical structures of lace and Ankara fabrics through direct field research using a qualitative method to analyse the data with random sampling. This study was conducted with the aim of giving insight into the growth of the arts so as to preserve the designs and styles for future development through the understanding of the two fabrics. The study reveals that the fabrics are texturally good in the body and therefore widely used by the low, middle and high-class personalities in Nigeria.

In our research, we prioritize the voices and experiences of Black Second World War soldiers and their experiences while in uniform. We specifically focused on Black men from the Midwest to examine their unique experiences with the South and Jim Crow laws and drew upon all ten oral history transcripts from the University of Kansas’s ‘World War II: The African American Experience’ project. These included individuals such as John H. Adams, a Tuskegee Airmen pilot who did not see combat, and William Tarlton, a member of the famous all-Black 92nd Army Division. Our analysis involved the constant comparative process using open, axial and selective coding, and we applied concepts from critical race theory to unpack the racial injustices embedded in their experiences. Individual accounts reveal the discriminatory treatment endured by Black soldiers in the United States, highlighting derogatory attitudes and forced relocations. While rank hierarchy occasionally superseded prejudices, the experiences demonstrate the persistent racism faced by Black soldiers despite their significant contributions while in uniform. These stories challenge the glorification of Second World War soldiers and shed light on the complex dynamics of racial interactions, emphasizing the need for awareness and dialogue about enduring disparities.

The goal of this study is to identify the self-perception of cancer survivors’ body image distress and to illustrate fashion-oriented consumption as a coping mechanism. Retail therapy (RT) may be a promising intervention for cancer survivors to mitigate body image distress and promote positive health outcomes. The impact of cancer treatments on each survivor should be considered based on their body investment, cancer type, diagnosis, body weight and other demographic characteristics. Developing mitigation strategies using RT for cancer survivors with visible physical changes is crucial. Fashion-oriented shopping can give cancer survivors a sense of control and boost a positive self-image. Cancer survivors who are highly conscious of societally prescribed definitions of normal appearance may benefit significantly from RT.

In 2016, Donald Trump’s slogan ‘Make America Great Again’ (MAGA) – often displayed on a red cap – prompted myriad interpretations and reactions regarding the message itself and the hat it was displayed upon. Despite the hat’s polysemy, there has been no shortage of institutional attempts to codify the hat and, by extension, the wearers of the hat as racist or otherwise ‘deplorable’ (Clinton 2016). By tracing the functional lineage of the MAGA hat alongside a case study of the 2019 Covington Catholic incident, this article uses media discourse analysis to investigate dress as a factional sociopolitical player while interrogating how cultural institutions contribute to social meaning-making, which in turn can leverage dress’s power and unduly malign constituent wearers. Employing theories of sartorial embodiment, the MAGA hat’s enthymematic reading and a critical linguistic frame, this article critiques the pathology of marginal myopia and locates how pejorative ascriptions by proxy of the MAGA hat render Trumpian conservatives, primarily of the White male ilk, as marginal subjects.

In this study on the power of dress in the Icelandic banking sector, we build on Nentwich and colleagues’ (2015) theoretical framework of change agency. We show that the framework bears relevance to changes occurring after the collapse of the Icelandic banking system in 2008. Our aim is to examine the role of dress in the process of change. The data are derived from ten semi-structured interviews with female bank employees, a group that has historically been marginalized within the Icelandic banking sector. Our findings reveal that visible changes in dress have signalled changes in societal norms and attitudes during and after the economic crisis. The disruption has created a window of opportunity for female bank employees to alter dressing norms. This alteration has subsequently increased their agency and visibility, thereby facilitating their upward mobility, mirroring with clients and representing confidence and trustworthiness. We find that changes in dress occur when ideas in society change, and that windows of opportunity are necessary for marginalized groups to expand their agency. Once these windows are created, dress can underline and bolster their agency.

This study examines how the handbag has developed into a highly reputable and gratifying object in the twenty-first century. It places it at the intersection of three attributes: a sociocultural accessory, a feminine hallmark and a status marker. The study considers these attributes as added values that have been mediated largely through advertising in social media. By investigating the system of representation consisting of language and image in the ads, this study can show how the production of meaning takes place, how it is connected to the culture of the brand and further mediated to consumers. The theoretical framework consists mainly of Hall’s constructionist approach, Barthes’s view of the double structure of the photograph being both denotative and connotative and Baudrillard’s theory of the relativity of the sign. The study sheds also light on the handbag’s latest appearance as non-fungible asset in the virtual world and the problematic volatility of its monetary value.