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- Volume 6, Issue 2, 2019
International Journal of Fashion Studies - Volume 6, Issue 2, 2019
Volume 6, Issue 2, 2019
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The scenographic, costumed chorus, agency and the performance of matter: A new materialist approach to costume
Authors: Donatella Barbieri and Greer CrawleyThis article presents the performativity of costume as generated through materially discursive iterative processes that embed meaning in the production itself through the analysis of the chorus costumes for the 2018 Opéra du Rhin production of Eugene Onegin. It argues that a new materialist approach can reveal the ethical concerns, around gender, toxic masculinity and compliance to reactionary social conventions, that lie at the core of this costuming of an opera chorus, particularly when perceived through the multiple forms that shape its distinct materializations over three successive acts. In addition, a focus on the agential actions of materials will draw attention to the work of the costume department, which to date has remained largely unaddressed by analytical approaches that are solely based on spectatorship, semiotics or phenomenological perspectives. Identifying the agential actions that materials perform enables the articulation of the costume specialist’s response to the performativity of materials. Adopting a new materialist approach, ‘costuming’ is found to be an evolving and relational form that emerges from a complex process of meaning-making that addresses, through a distribution of agency, how materials connect to wider concerns.
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Tetela amulets: Re-interpreting a medical anthropology collection as a fashion benchmark
More LessIn the 1920s and 1930s, missionaries and colonial officials in equatorial Africa collected thousands of amulets – devices worn on the body that were made locally for protection and healing (spiritual and/or physical). One of these collections – assembled in the 1920s by an American pseudo-missionary, Major John White – is now held at the Mathers Museum of World Cultures at Indiana University, which accepted the amulets and other artefacts used by the Tetela people as an example of ‘medical anthropology’. Although they were not made as ‘fashion’ (or even as art), I argue that they can be viewed as a style of dress specific to a time and place and thus as fashion. Like fashions in clothing, individual amulets can be shown to have similarities in their form and symbolic meaning, which can be expected to change over time. I propose looking at this collection of amulets as a ‘fashion benchmark’ in the history of Tetela dress, calling for further research and seeking to push the boundaries on our conception of fashion, making it less focused on the ‘fashion industry’ and more inclusive of slower-changing styles of dress, minority cultures, and non-western cultures.
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From state uniform to fashion: Japanese adoption of western clothing since the late nineteenth century
More LessSince the late nineteenth century, yōfuku (a vague Japanese concept referring to all clothing originating from western countries) has spread predominantly from the upper to the lower class and from urban to rural space in Japan. In this process, the symbolic meaning attached to it has been transformed. Once a symbol of male elites, yōfuku has become ‘Japanese fashion’ and is now an expression of current Japanese (pop) culture. This article investigates the adoption process of yōfuku – especially the school uniform, which has reflected the contrasts between elite and non-elite, modernity and tradition, masculinity and femininity, and public duty and private life. Drawing on the case study of Japan, this article also sheds light on the complexity and variety that exist in modernization processes.
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How to dress up in Eretz Israel, 1880s–1948: A visual approach to clothing, fashion and nation building
More LessThis article provides a methodological approach to the integration of Zionist photographs into research on the pre-state Jewish community in Eretz Israel from the end of the nineteenth century until the foundation of the Jewish state in 1948. By focusing on dress, and drawing on visual culture and fashion studies, the article highlights the role of the individual in nation building and foregrounds the influence of various migrant groups in the emergence of a national project. While scholarship has largely ignored the role of dress, and especially male dress, in pre-state settings, the article takes the example of Eretz Israel to show how examining dress in Zionist photographs sheds light on the experimental and transnational character in search of a new Hebrew culture. By examining three photographs of socialist Zionist groups of the second Aliyah, the article shows how male Zionist settlers integrated transnational dressing habits and fantasies about their imagined homeland. They created a new way of dressing as an expression of political agendas that were interconnected with the reinvention of a new image of the male Jew. Looking beyond the case study of Eretz Israel, the article stresses the broader relevance of dress in the negotiations and power struggles at the micro level of a pre-state community and the emergence of national clothing ideals. It concludes by outlining ways of refining the methodological approach, and suggesting future research avenues at the intersection of fashion studies and nation building by shifting the focus towards case studies prior to the existence of national fashion systems.
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Fabricating black modernity: Fashion and African American womanhood during the first great migration
More LessThe early twentieth century was a time of great influx in America. Shifting demographics in the 1910s and 1920s, most notably the migration of thousands of African Americans from the rural South to the urban centres of the North, opened economic and leisure possibilities that provided new spaces to define black modernity and its role in shaping American identity. Debates over black women’s bodies, clothing, hair, and general appearance stood at the centre of public attention and political discourse over gender and race equality, forming a realm where African Americans could challenge white racist stereotypes regarding black femininity and beauty, as well as a means through which they could claim new freedoms and achieve economic mobility. Middle-class reformers, young black migrants, as well as new role models such as female performers and blues singers, all used dress and appearance to redefine notions of beauty, respectability and freedom on their own terms. For these women, fashions became intertwined with questions of racial progress and inclusion in American society, offering a way to lay claims for equal citizenship that moved beyond individual expressions and preferences. This article highlights the place of fashion as a critical political realm for African Americans, who were often barred from access to formal routes of power in the era of Jim Crow. Shifting the perspective beyond official forms of civil rights activism, it argues that fashion enabled black women to carve new positions of power from which they could actively participate in gender and racial politics, demanding their equal place in American society.
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Mizrahim masculine fashion as the expression of political confrontation in Israel in the 1970s
Authors: Shoshana-Rose Marzel and Henriette Dahan-KalevThis article explores how and why, in the 1970s, Israeli Mizrahi men – Jews from Arab countries – used fashion (among other tools) to both rebel against Ashkenazim hegemony and reconnect with their own roots. This article first shows how, during Israel’s pre-state era, many Jewish Ashkenazim pioneers wore a very simple outfit that was associated with socialist political ideology and became the male Israeli national dress code before and after Israel’s establishment in 1948. Not all Israelis identified with it, though: in the 1970s, second-generation male Mizrahim rebelled against the ethnic and racial discrimination they suffered from Ashkenazim, and used fashion alongside other means to express their opposition. By doing so, Mizrahim paved the way for contemporary male Israeli fashion. This article clarifies how this fashion change occurred, and how it converged with political upheaval. It also discloses the links with Mizrahim Arabic heritage concerning body care.
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Book Review
By Nazlı AlimenModern Fashion Traditions: Negotiating Tradition and Modernity through Fashion, M. Angela Jansen and Jennifer Craik (eds) (2016) 1st ed., London and New York: Bloomsbury, 256 pp., 23 b/w illustrations ISBN 978 1 47422 949 4, Hardback, UK £90.00; Paperback, UK £28.99; eBook, UK £31.30
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