International Journal of Fashion Studies - Volume 6, Issue 1, 2019

Members of online menswear communities spend their leisure time engaged in extensive textual discussions of menswear. This article presents some of the findings from a study of these online menswear communities. It is based on an online ethnography of six online menswear forums and 50 in-depth interviews with men from Britain, Canada and the United States who use them. It details how the research participants, despite their passion for clothing, produced a rhetorical distance between style and fashion. Fashion was rejected in favour of what was described as ‘classic menswear’, ‘style’, ‘timeless style’ or simply ‘clothes’. This was a productive critique of fashion’s temporality, with online menswear communities offering a more democratic, inclusive and participatory alternative to men’s fashion. However, this rejection of fashion also reflected the persistent gendering of fashion. As spaces for the discussion of clothing, as opposed to fashion, online menswear communities allowed men to enjoy clothes and consumption without their masculinity being tainted by fashion’s associations with femininity.

This article is based in an understanding of the cultural and creative industries in general, and of the fashion industry in particular, as marked by a fundamental ambivalence affecting the symbolic value of the commodities produced as well as the organization of labour in the industry. The aim is to understand how work in the contemporary Swedish fashion system is organized and experienced by the people who, through their creative work, help to maintain and reproduce this industry. Using ethnographic fieldwork to gather empirical material, the article explores the experiences of working in a volatile field, as expressed by the informants who hold various types of creative positions, and suggests that for many of those who work creatively, the economic underpinnings of the job are central but not always dominant as driving forces. It concludes that creative work should not only be studied in regards to specific kinds of tasks but also in consideration of how long the practitioner has been active in the creative industries, as well as their overall position in life, along with which forms of capital they have at their disposal, financial or otherwise.

Clothing and its intimate proximity to the body and self have been widely explored, and yet there is little psychological research that explores the experience of wearing items of clothing imbued with personal meanings, memories and emotions. This novel study explores the experience of actively worn items of attachment clothing from a psychological perspective. Method: due to a dearth of literature within this area, a qualitative methodology was employed. Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) was used as the focus was to explore details of participants’ experience. A homogenous sample of five participants was used. Participants were asked to wear to the interview a garment that they felt emotionally attached to and was still in use. Semi-structured interviews were used, allowing for flexibility, thus ensuring the elicitation of rich data. Results: findings demonstrated that clothing attachment is a multifaceted and rich phenomenon. The garments were appropriated and imbued with a symbolic resonance that participants accessed through wearing the attachment garment. Conclusion: results link to and extend previous literature on possession attachment and provide nuanced findings that could impact areas within both fashion literature and psychology literature.

This article, located at the crossroads where press culture meets corporate history, analyses the functional collaboration of two magazines within the same publishing house – American Vogue (1892) and French Vogue (1920) – through the analysis of unpublished private archives. It explores for the first time, through the case of fashion illustration, the scope and nature of their agreements and divergences in order to understand the way that French Vogue won the freedom to pursue its own format and editorial objectives during the 1930s. The combined history of these two editions is also part of a second narrative, whose elements are stylistic and aesthetic – that is, the evolution from Pictorialism to modernism – and technical – that is, the transition from drawing to photography, as part of the internationalization of press practices. By focusing on the conflict between American and French Vogues in their approach to fashion illustration, this article illuminates those competing visions. The editors of American Vogue incorporated illustrations into their broadly commercial conceptualization of the fashion magazine. On the contrary, the editors of French Vogue saw their illustrations principally as art, as a reflection of the creativity of the couturiers.

This article discusses the storytelling strategies adopted by luxury fashion companies to build global brands from the 1990s onwards. Using the example of Christian Dior, it is demonstrated that heritage is a social construction based on strong narratives rather than the mere outcome of the history of a brand. Storytelling is a powerful instrument used in the context of creating global luxury brands over the last two decades. This makes it possible to emphasize the timelessness of a brand while disregarding the contradictions resulting from a change in its identity over time. As a consequence, this article argues that, although the use of heritage through storytelling is a useful tool for the practice of brand management, it is not an academic concept and should be avoided by scholars.

Experimental Fashion: Performance Art, Carnival and the Grotesque Body, Francesca Granata (2017, first edition) London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 217 pp., ISBN 978-1-78453-379-3, p/bk, £14.99; ISBN 978-1-78453-378-6, h/bk, £63

Faith and Fashion in Turkey: Consumption, Politics and I slamic Identities, Nazlı Alimen (2018, first edition) London: I.B. Tauris, 305 pp., ISBN 978-1-78831-166-3, h/bk, £72.00

Fashion in Multiple Chinas: Chinese Styles in the Transglobal Landscape, Wessie Ling and Simona Segre Reinach (eds) (2018, first edition) London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 272 pp., ISBN 978-1-78453-864-4, h/bk, £64.00, US $94.00

Dizionario della moda: Inglese/Italiano, Italiano/Inglese, Mariella Lorusso (2017, first edition) Bologna: Zanichelli, 640 pp., ISBN 978-8-80816-489-6, p/bk 24.50