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- Volume 8, Issue 1, 2021
Fashion, Style & Popular Culture - Black Lives Matter: Fashion, Style & Aesthetics, Jan 2021
Black Lives Matter: Fashion, Style & Aesthetics, Jan 2021
- Introduction
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- Editorial
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- Articles
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‘A mirror to the room’: Pyer Moss, specular strategy and Black Lives Matter
More LessDrawing on Walter Benjamin’s version of historical materialism and with reference to the concept of despecularization from psychoanalytic film theory, this article looks at the historical and cultural significance of Pyer Moss’s Spring/Summer 2015 fashion show, where Kerby Jean-Raymond, the artist and designer behind the label, used the runway to bring attention to state-enforced violence against Black men and women.
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How beauty product use links to Black Lives Matter: Examining the influence of beliefs of health threats on behaviour
Authors: Melodie Davis-Bundrage, Katalin Medvedev and Jori N. HallThis study examines the influence of Black women’s beliefs of health threats on purchase intentions towards beauty products. It investigates whether Black women use natural beauty products to avoid health threats and injustice. Two focus groups were conducted with eleven female African American participants as part of a larger multi-method study. This article details the focus group sessions in which participants shared their stories and beliefs of how beauty ideals and products have negatively impacted their health and lives. Results indicate that constructs of the Health Belief Model (HBM) relate to the participants’ lived experiences, that ‘Blackness’ – has a major influence on consumer behaviour and that barriers, such as racism, often prevent them from a leading healthier lifestyles. The findings provide insights into Black women’s lives as consumers and communicate the importance of beauty product toxicity and healthy product development as topics of concern within the Black Lives Matter movement.
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The social lens of choice of hairstyle among Ghanaian female youth
More LessIn this article, we review research on social factors with the main focus being on how self, social factors and fashion consciousness interact with the choice of hairstyles. By highlighting the situations of 397 Ghanaian female youth, we show how their perspectives define beautiful hairstyles and how social factors interact with the choice of hairstyle with fashion consciousness as a mediator. Using social actual-concept and social factors on behaviours as theoretical frameworks, we show the influence of religious influence, views of social group members, attractiveness and uniqueness on choice of hairstyle. Mediator analyses indicate that fashion consciousness explains the interactions among views of social group members and attractiveness with the choice of hairstyle. Implications for marketing and future directions for research on choice of hairstyle are suggested.
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#BlackRepresentationsMatter: Viewing digital activism through symbology
More LessDigital activism has become a new and pervasive way by which today’s diverse youth synthesize agency from virtually anywhere. While there are criticisms that the digital infrastructure constructs pseudo-mobilization, the purpose of this article is to refute this belief, showing that online practices can manifest themselves in physical agency. It aims to show that customers can dictate the narrative that they want and appreciate about their identities and will seek out products that reflect the type of individual they believe they are. This aligns with the postmodern view of rejecting a metanarrative and creating discourses that are not one-size-fits-all concerning Black community(ies).
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Using autopoiesis to discover the birth of fashion
More LessHow personal and social fashion might be formed at a nascent level is detectable in the Mursi and Omo people. These groups remained within the African continent after its post-Pangaea formation; the Mursi and Omo have retained practices and beliefs that hitherto have not been considered critical to the formation of fashion. Fashion scholarship has followed a limited version of history that permeates museology, teaching and fashion design. Its impetus responds to the idea that fashion was formed in Bruges, Belgium, during the birth of capitalism, between 1280 and 1390. Clothes created before 1280 in non-European settings has generally been regarded as costume, hence the epistemological gap that stymies an inclusivity scholarship. This development has ramifications for a reconsideration of when the historical gaze commences, and where geographically it falls. Indeed, fashion is reconsidered to be inordinately autochthonous. This is an examination of post-structuralism as applied to a visual system via human presentation and social autopoiesis, a system that reproduces itself and does so without requiring external operations for the system for continuation. The activity of fashion visualized is examined as a claim of a live system that stresses the study of the individual and the group as an activity for self-actualization. The relative freedom in which the Mursi and Omo peoples of Ethiopia create fashion is discussed as opposed to the lack of autonomy available to formal fashion designers working in the West and particularly those being trained and educated in fashion schools. This article refutes Barthesian concepts of fashion for three reasons. First, Barthes grounded his scope within the venture of the fashion industrial complex and its profit agenda, served by mechanisms such as fashion photography, advertising and promotion. Second, Barthes’ work concerns an exposition of semiotics where fashion is merely the subject of containment. Lastly, the establishment of fashion is a creative act concerning the human body, since no evidence can be proffered to decipher which came first – human making marks on the land, trees or cave walls, or mark-making on live human skin. I proceed with the idea that the Omo provide a glimpse of the birth of fashion in that they make the step of distancing themselves from nature by re-creating themselves as objectified and in the world.
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- Design Concepts
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Designed for diabetic health!: Exploratory sneaker changing the direction in footwear for the Black community
More LessThe purpose of this design concept was to create a stylish diabetic sneaker for individuals with diabetes. The creation of a sneaker design to accommodate diabetic foot conditions is a distinct need in the special footwear industry. Health-related preventive measures that would make a sneaker more comfortable yet fashionable for communities of people of colour who have diabetes were explored. By promoting awareness of preventions that can be undertaken to improve the quality of life for individuals with diabetes, this sneaker design concept, which incorporates health-related features, will help change the direction of sneaker design for individuals with diabetes in the Black community and will enhance their efforts to be more physically active.
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- Interviews
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- Book Review
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Dressed in Dreams: A Black Girl’s Love Letter to the Power of Fashion, Tanisha C. Ford (2019)
More LessReview of: Dressed in Dreams: A Black Girl’s Love Letter to the Power of Fashion, Tanisha C. Ford (2019)
New York: St Martin’s Press, 256 pp.,
ISBN 978-1-25017-353-9, h/bk, $27.99
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Fashion and Appropriation
Authors: Denise Nicole Green and Susan B. Kaiser
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