Fashion, Style & Popular Culture - Volume 2, Issue 3, 2015

Dorothy Shaver is documented as the first female President of a major American retail firm and yet Hortense Odlum at Bonwit Teller (1934–1940) preceded her by ten years. Odlum came to position as President of Bonwit Teller when the country was in the throes of the Great Depression. With no work experience and little education, Odlum approached the business from the only perspective she knew, that of a customer who appreciated style, service and practicality. Through examination of Odlum’s autobiography, newspaper and fashion reports, and other primary source material, it becomes clear how Odlum not only improved business, but more than doubled the volume at Bonwit Teller. Some of her strategies included pricing diversification, and the creation of departments for specific target markets including men and women in college. She also established a Consumer’s Advisory Committee to better capture the female voices of shoppers. Odlum’s approach pioneered the creation of a store by a woman for women.

The house of Dior is one of the most successful fashion brands in the world. However, after the sudden death of Christian Dior, in 1957 there was a question as to whether the brand could survive without its founder at the helm. The longevity and success of historic fashion houses has been, in many ways, dependent on finding a head designer capable of carrying on both the legacy and the continued financial success of the brand. Since so much emphasis is placed on the identity and credentials of the head designer of a fashion label, the hiring process is frequently a public affair. As gatekeepers to the fashion world, the media keeps interested parties abreast of the proceedings and subsequent results of the hiring process. A study of the news discourse concerning the search for, announcement, and evaluation of new designer appointments at historically established fashion houses was undertaken to explore the framing of these events in the media. Christian Dior was purposefully selected for this study due to its longevity and the level of media interest in the seven different designers that have held the top design position at the storied house. The New York Times was selected as the site of research due to its history of providing readers with coverage of the international fashion scene in both general interest news categories and its dedicated style sections. A critical discourse analysis of 73 articles utilized iterative, comparative and reflective readings of text to reveal both the socially constructed and the socially constructing elements. The study explores the discursive practices employed by the popular fashion press to report, analyse and validate new designer/artistic director appointments at established fashion houses. How the discourse situated these processes within the larger context and history of the house is also discussed.

When blackness is received by an industrial cultural organization it is subject to degradation of meaning and effect. Black designers wishing to operate in the upper echelons of the fashion industry must reconnoiter their positions by employing self-sabotage and offer less potent versions of operational blackness. This article unpacks how blackness is operated and mythologized within the Parisian fashion system. The authors investigate Patrick Kelly’s passage from obscurity to prominence as being in keeping with the Hegelian master–slave dialectic. The importance of this unpacking is timely as black fashion designers are increasingly breaching an exclusion zone that placed them formally outside the mainstream fashion system.

Handbag is an iconic fashion accessory in our material culture. Following the tradition of representational thinking, this article introduces the handbag as an epistemic consumption object through which to investigate consumer experiences, practices and identity construction in relation to everyday lived discourses. The handbag research involves an examination of participants’ personal belongings inside their bags together with phenomenological interviews concerning the associated subjective experiences along with these material objects. We demonstrate how these material possessions become the subject of the research that facilitates multiple conversations between researchers and participants as to introspect, evaluate and interpret the significance of symbolic consumption in their everyday life. This study contributes to proposing a systematic way of employing interpretive research methodology in the studies of material culture; in addition, this study on the handbag can act as an inspiration for others in identifying emerging themes and topics into symbolism in popular culture.

While there are some who would argue that the origin of Lolita fashion can be traced back to fiction (namely, the 1955 novel Lolita, which was adapted to film in 1962 and again in 1997) and has relevance to sexual attractiveness with reference to the young, this popular style developed more recently into a subcultural identity in Japan as a distinctive style in its own right. This article regards Lolita as an independent street fashion and subculture and explores this particular culture that Lolitas (those who wear this distinct fashion style) have created. Although a small-scale subculture, Lolitas demonstrate an obvious way of thinking and behaving that reinforces their identity, in which fashion plays a significant role. The fashion style suggests escapism through fantasy as it can be interpreted as a visual resistance against conventional culture and is therefore of interest to a range of disciplines including fashion, culture and behaviour theorists. The article explores this subculture in the UK context to provide a better understanding of British Lolitas and evaluates the marketplace to offer a retail-marketing perspective.

Jeff Stryker was arguably one of the biggest male porn stars the industry has ever seen. Known for his uniquely dominant and vocal style, Jeff Stryker starred in over 30 adult features that covered genres as diverse as ‘straight’, ‘bisexual’ and ‘gay’. His popularity as a porn star led to a crossover career in modelling that included stints with such legendary designers as Thierry Mugler and Jean Paul Gaultier. As the porn industry goes through an uneasy transition over the last decade thanks to the communication revolution, we sit down with Jeff to get his thoughts on everything from the current state of the porn industry, its links with fashion and how it influences contemporary masculinity.

This article attempts to explore the theme of subverted innocence in Adam Geczy’s recent installation work S/M Wonderland. Geczy’s work suggests that loss of innocence is fiction. As with Nietzsche, however, once one discards the notion of sin and guilt, one returns to a type of innocence, but an innocence radically different from the pure, virginal innocence before the fall. Geczy’s installation explores this theme with reference to fashion, queer theory and Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. Geczy challenges us to think about innocence, leaving us in a difficult situation, forced to mediate between our reactions of excitement and revulsion. Geczy’s installation leaves us with a coldness that prevents us from being innocent spectators.

‘The Fashion World of Jean Paul Gaultier: From the Sidewalk to the Catwalk’, London, 9 April–16 August 2014

Fashion Media: Past and Present, Djurda Bartlett, Shaun Cole and Agnès Rocamora (eds) (2013) London: Bloomsbury, 200 pp., ISBN: 9780857853066, h/bk, $100.00; ISBN: 9780857853073, p/bk, $34.95 (b/w illustrations and 40 colour plates)

Fashion and War in Popular Culture, Denise N. Rall (2014) Bristol: Intellect Books, 200 pp., ISBN: 9781841507514, p/bk, $22.50

Fashion on Television: Identity and Celebrity Culture, Helen Warner (2014) London, New Delhi, New York and Sydney: Bloomsbury, 183 pp., ISBN: 9780857854407, h/bk, $99.95; ISBN: 9780857854414, p/bk, $29.95; ISBN: 9781472567451 (ePDF); ISBN: 9781472567468 (ePub)

Charles James: Beyond Fashion, Harold Koda (2014) New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 264 pp., ISBN-10: 0300204361, ISBN-13: 978-0300204360, h/bk, $50