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- Volume 4, Issue 2, 2017
Fashion, Style & Popular Culture - Volume 4, Issue 2, 2017
Volume 4, Issue 2, 2017
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Inspiration or prototype? Appropriation and exploitation in the fashion industry
More LessAbstractIn this article I focus on the fashion industry’s relationship to vintage garments as design inspiration and product prototype. I analyse how appropriation of vintage is rationalized in standard industry practice and how ethical boundaries are drawn and maintained between ‘appropriation’ and ‘inspiration’ in the creative process. When talking with designers the discussion of inspiration and appropriation quickly becomes a personal and subjective discussion about the integrity of the design process and labour. So any discussion of creativity and industry practices has a responsibility to address the rank and file workers who bring artistic visions to life. Interns and employees in the industry were expected to knock-off other designs and designers while their own creativity was stifled and/or exploited. The central contradiction that emerges from this research is how an industry known for its creativity and ingenuity – notably an industry that polices copyright infringements around the world – routinely engages in practices of forgery that weaken both its claims to authorship and the lucrative status of designer-as-artistic-genius. I contend it is crucial to explore these issues through the situated and local everyday practices in the fashion industry in order to understand how these contradictions are navigated and even made profitable.
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Chanel the bricoleur: Steal all the ideas you can
Authors: Dabrina Taylor and John JacobAbstractAlthough she is arguably regarded as France’s most celebrated designer, Chanel did not train within the classical Parisian haute couture system. This article examines the onetime milliner and couture interloper as a bricoleur, a female ‘handyman’ who made do with materials at hand to create something new (Claude Levi-Strauss 1966). In the earliest years of her career, Chanel’s transformative ‘making do’ centred on her appropriations of garments and styles that were coded masculine, and these masculine borrowings were foundational in the development of an easily copied Chanel feminine aesthetic – most notably apparent in the little black dress – that was suitable for women’s entrée into modernity’s heretofore male-identified public sphere. The discussion highlights the role of fashion appropriation in negotiating the gender tensions and ambiguities associated with women’s emergence into early twentieth-century life, considering the special case of fashion diffusion that occurs when members of a less-powerful group emulate and appropriate styles from those who are more privileged.
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Appropriation, articulation and authentication in Acid House: The evolution of women’s fashion throughout the early years (1987–1988) of the Acid House culture
By Tara TierneyAbstractThe purpose of this article is to explore how ‘dress’ from the 1960s’ American Hippy movement was appropriated and adapted by women in the ‘British Acid House’ music culture. The emergence of ‘Acid House’ transformed nightclubs from ‘places for drinking and looking good but not for dancing’, into a space where ravers would dance through the night fuelled by the drug, ecstasy. These changes manifested in a number of ways, most notably, through transformation of outward appearance, which included appropriation of the Hippy movement and ‘First Summer of Love’ in 1967. Similarities between Acid House and the Hippy culture were so akin that this early period of House music became known as ‘The Second Summer of Love’.
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Vlisco: Made in Holland, adorned in West Africa, (re)appropriated as Dutch design
More LessAbstractWhile the idea of ‘Africa’ is sometimes a source of inspiration for brands and designers aimed at the western market, the colourful wax prints by the Dutch company Vlisco were historically made for West and Central African consumers. These fabrics, designed and produced in the Netherlands, have become interconnected with African culture and identity. Established in 1846, the company Vlisco focused on the Dutch East Indies and later West and Central Africa as its export markets. Yet today, Vlisco is playing an increasing role in western fashion, art and design. Moreover, Vlisco has recently collaborated with renowned Dutch designers such as Viktor&Rolf, actively (re)appropriating the wax printed fashion fabrics as Dutch. In this article I explore the multiple layers of cultural (re)appropriation, and the deep-rooted ‘cultural hybridity’, underlying Vlisco’s wax printed fashion fabrics. The most recent form of cultural (re)appropriation is the way in which Vlisco presents itself within the context of Dutch design. In this article I focus on the hybrid cultural dynamics underlying the performance of Africanity – and recent Dutchness – through the use of Vlisco’s fabrics in the context of today’s globalized fashion system.
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Dreaded culture: The appropriation of a culture of resistance in Aotearoa New Zealand
More LessAbstractIn Subculture: The Meaning of Style ([1979] 1988), Dick Hebdige noted that ‘somewhere between Trenchtown and Ladbroke Grove the cult of Rastafari had become a “style”: an expressive combination of “locks,” of khaki camouflage and “weed”’. For cultures of resistance such as Rastafari, aesthetic determinants are more than simple visually identifying features. Rather, these elements are the foundation of unity, a shared aesthetic that points to a shared world-view, a shared consciousness or livity. However, in the processes of cultural appropriation, the significance of such aesthetic qualities are often entirely re-determined. This article considers the cultural appropriation of Rastafari in the context of Aotearoa New Zealand in order to reflect upon the intricate ways in which the aesthetic elements of culture play into the processes of appropriation. In so doing, this article illustrates the contradictions and ambiguities involved in processes of cultural appropriation and suggests that such processes be considered in relation to their contextual adoption, rather than by way of simple reductionist binaries.
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Event Review
By Ali KhanAbstractAMAZON TOKYO FASHION WEEK: S/S 2017 COLLECTIONS, 17–23 OCTOBER 2016
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Exhibition Reviews
Authors: Gwyneth I. Williams and Nina WintersAbstractLITTLE BLACK DRESS: FROM MOURNING TO NIGHT, MISSOURI HISTORY MUSEUM, ST. LOUIS, MO, USA, 2 APRIL 2016–5 SEPTEMBER 2016
ALEXANDER MCQUEEN: SAVAGE BEAUTY, LONDON, 14 MARCH–2 AUGUST 2015
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Book Reviews
AbstractCOSTUME DESIGN SINCE 1945: HISTORICAL DRESS FROM COUTURE TO STREET STYLE, DEIRDRE CLANCY (2015) 2nd ed. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 280 pp., ISBN: 9781472539403, h/bk/ ISBN: 9781472524249, p/bk, €21.99
THE DRESS DETECTIVE, INGRID MIDA AND ALEXANDRA KIM (2015) London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 224pp., ISBN: 9781472573971, p/bk, $39.95
THE FIRST BOOK OF FASHION: THE BOOK OF CLOTHES OF MATTHÄUS & VEIT KONRAD SCHWARZ OF AUGSBURG, ULINKA RUBLACK AND MARIA HAYWARD (EDS) (2015) London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 410pp., ISBN: 9780857857682, h/bk, $38.99
THE BIRTH OF COOL: STYLE NARRATIVES OF THE AFRICAN DIASPORA, CAROL TULLOCH (2016) 1st ed., London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 254 pp., ISBN: 9781859734704, p/bk, $34.95
DRESS, FASHION AND TECHNOLOGY: FROM PREHISTORY TO THE PRESENT, PHYLLIS G. TORTORA (2015) London: Bloomsbury Academic, 245 pp., ISBN: 9780857851901, h/bk, $102.00/ISBN: 9780857851918, p/bk, $27.99
STREET STYLE: AN ETHNOGRAPHY OF FASHION BLOGGING, BRENT LUVAAS (2016) London: Bloomsbury Academic, 336 pp., ISBN: 9780857855756, p/bk, £19.99
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Fashion and Appropriation
Authors: Denise Nicole Green and Susan B. Kaiser
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