International Journal of Fashion Studies - Volume 3, Issue 2, 2016

This ethnographic study of streetwear designers in Dakar, Senegal explores the way that five artist/designers create images of maps and relate them to concepts of ‘identity’ far different from those in western fashion discourse. The designers recode these and other concepts into a Wolof signifying system. They connect ‘identity’ and ‘tradition’ to Wolof cultural values like ‘thiossane’ and ‘askan,’ words which do not translate directly into European languages. With such words and images, the streetwear designers invite us to question basic concepts in western fashion studies, to doubt if we can apply these universally. In this article, the term fashion map has two intertwined meanings. First, it refers to the standard schema of ‘world fashion cities’. Second, artistic map images are also fashion statements. As the Dakar designers create map images that express their cultural concerns, they also redraw this standard world fashion map.

The starting point for this article is the observation that in fashion there is no established form of criticism comparable to the art system or the literary system. The intent of this article is to provide a critical sociological analysis of the relationship between the fashion industry and fashion media and to trace the limits imposed on fashion criticism by this mutual structural-economic-dependency. The article examines the socio-economic and cultural ties between the fashion industry and fashion media since the nineteenth century to the present and investigates the consequences of these ties for the development and limits of criticism in fashion journalism. The article discusses the emergence of a discourse of normative constraint in digital media and argues that the advent of digital fashion media led to an intensification of the economic limitations to fashion criticism. By analysing the conditions and limitations of criticism in the realm of fashion journalism, the article brings the literature on fashion media into conversation with critical theory and the sociology of critique.

The discipline of curating fashion has experienced a cultural turn in the last decades. What were controversial approaches are now recognized as pioneering and significant in having encouraged debates and opened the discipline through rethinking existing paradigms. This contribution analyses the challenges and criticisms surrounding fashion displays, with the aim to address the centrality of interpretation and performativity in relation to key fashion exhibitions. The article explores ‘the power of display’ (Staniszewski 1998; 2000) through mediums and spaces, whether physical, digital or both. Within museum studies, the focus on the visitors’ experience and on the narrative has been identified as a key feature of a ‘new museology’ (Vergo 1989; Hein 2000; Henning 2006), which ultimately leads us to question the purposes of museum and gallery displays. With references to museum studies, fashion curation and philosophy, and drawing from insightful conversations with fashion curators, the article examines the exhibition’s potential to provide a context for visual and material experiences, as well as for a new understanding and articulation of knowledge. The contribution embraces Foucault’s reflection on heterotopia (1986 [1967]; 1992 [1966]), arguing that the content of the museum as a space of difference is the interpretation itself. Reflecting on exhibition design as a medium in its own right (Celant 1996a), the article highlights performativity as a fundamental feature of the exhibits, of the installation and, more broadly, of the museum space.

Ethical fashion consumers who assess the environmental and social aspects of products before purchasing them are relatively rare because fashion consumption is a complex activity and tends to occur under conditions that tend to discourage ethical considerations. Standard criteria for evaluating ecologically sound or safe products or services are lacking. The ethical fashion market is a niche market, constituting about 1 per cent of the global fashion industry. Two-thirds of ethical fashion producers are located in the United Kingdom and the United States. Consumers tend to be poorly informed about ethical aspects of products and services. Fashion companies are moving towards responsible production but consumers are less likely to engage in responsible consumption due to higher prices, lack of readily available ethical goods and misleading information about products. Ethical hardliners, strongly committed to eco-fashion, are a minority.

Identity is acquiring a new importance in fashion studies that goes beyond the sphere of personal consumption. The aestheticizing climate of postmodernity has justified consumer activity in the name of a flexible identity, while clothing has been confirmed as an aesthetic resource for self-presentation. Some young consumers – the so-called urban tribes – have made their mask a flag, creating peculiar ways of dressing during leisure time. For particular cultural minorities, a true political antagonism is at stake and the flag stands for a declaration of an open will to emancipate from the dominant culture.

Increasing consumers’ awareness of fashion-sustainability problems and their expectations towards the production system have led to the necessity of considering together the different actors in the fashion chain. In fact, the reflexive identities of late modernity are concerned dialectically with the construction of a social imaginary that does not exclusively pertain to consumers or producers; nor does it concern the mere aesthetic enrichment of the image, but rather the complex arena where meanings are built. In this same frame, a very recent variation of responsible fashion aims at reducing the distance between production and consumption in view of a sharing of practices, technologies and products. The ethical dimension of fashion widens to include values that transcend individual self-presentation to encompass images of collective identities and convivial communities.

Using Pauline van Dongen’s ‘Wearable Solar’ project as a case study, the authors argue that materiality and embodiment should be taken into account both in the design of and the theoretical reflection on wearable technology. Bringing together a fashion designer and scholars from cultural studies, this interdisciplinary research aims at advancing the design and academic study of wearable technology. The interdisciplinary framework involves a mixed-method approach: a combination of research through design; interviews with wearers during fittings; and theoretical reflection. A theoretical and methodological focus on materiality allows for a sustained analysis of embodiment and embodied experience, while it also enables attention to the materiality of the textile and the technology involved. This ‘embodied approach’ is situated in ‘new materialism’ and more specifically in a of reappraisal Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology. Through the exploration of ‘embodied design’, the lived experience of the wearer is incorporated into design practice, research methods and theoretical analysis. The relevance of wearable technology for potential future users can only be advanced when new meanings and values are created through interaction with the design. Working through a phenomenologically driven research through design, solar technology is better integrated into fashion so as to make ‘solar fashion’ more wearable in the near future.

MUSLIM FASHION: CONTEMPORARY STYLE CULTURES, REINA LEWIS (2015, FIRST EDITION) Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 400 pp., ISBN: 9780822359142, Hardback, US $99.95; ISBN: 9780822359340, Paperback, US $28.95

ARRESTING DRESS: CROSS-DRESSING, LAW, AND FASCINATION IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY SAN FRANCISCO, CLARE SEARS (2015, FIRST EDITION) Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 202 pp., ISBN: 9780822357544, Hardback, US $79.95, ISBN: 9780822357582, Paperback, US $22.95

ASIANS WEAR CLOTHES ON THE INTERNET: RACE, GENDER AND THE WORK OF PERSONAL STYLE BLOGGING, MINH-HA T. PHAM (2015, FIRST EDITION) Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 272 pp., ISBN: 9780822360155, Hardback, US $89.95, ISBN: 9780822360308, Paperback, US $24.95

THIS YEAR’S MODEL: FASHION, MEDIA, AND THE MAKING OF GLAMOUR, ELIZABETH WISSINGER (2015, FIRST EDITION) New York and London: New York University Press, 352 pp., ISBN: 9781479864775, Paperback, US $28.00