International Journal of Fashion Studies - Volume 8, Issue 1, 2021

This article takes its departure in a study of eight immigrant women and their wardrobes in the period of autumn 2017–spring 2018. The study was conducted in the Danish municipality of Kolding as part of the initial steps in the research programme THREAD – a 33-month innovation project about integration through textile skills hosted by the Centre for Textiles Research in Copenhagen. The study should be perceived as part of a design anthropological investigation consisting of multiple approaches, with the purpose of developing opportunities for job creation and self-employment of immigrant women in the Danish fashion and textile sector. Methodologically, it is based on the so-called ‘wardrobe method’, which means that clothing objects stored in the homes of respondents form the material base of the study around which issues of integration, modesty, appropriateness, change, memory, aspirations, dreams, etc. are negotiated on a daily basis. The article further showcases examples of how the insights were pooled together with other explorative activities and later brought into play in the three E’s of THREAD – empowerment, employment and entrepreneurship.

Recently, fashion has become a target for political considerations and ‘strategic governmentalization’ in such countries as Denmark, Australia and New Zealand, among others. The Finnish government has also paid attention to fashion. This research uses the concept of ‘governmentality’ as a form of power with the purpose to understand how fashion is governed in a contemporary western society. Taking Finland as a site of fieldwork, this research shows how various governmental and non-governmental actors, aligned in fluid networks, produce policy for fashion, what rationalities lay behind their actions and what kind of dilemmas they have to address.

This article analyses the cultural construction of youth and beauty as socially dominant values through an interrogation of Colombian fashion magazines produced between 1970 and 1999. To this end, the article analyses the role of fashion and the textile industry – including brands, textile companies and designers – within this key period to understand the transformation of male and female values in the process of establishing youth as an imperative standard for appearance and behaviour. The methodology used is discourse analysis applied to visual and textual advertising published by fashion magazines during the aforementioned period, as a means to understand the ideals and values of fashion and its material culture. This article reveals the tensions between the historical construction of youth in Colombia and the textile and fashion industries, the de-differentiation of youth as a value in men and women, and the paradoxical ambiguity between the ephemeral logic of fashion and the eternal aspiration of youth. These issues have not been adequately explored with regard to Colombia yet.

Carpets woven in Mexico today use design elements found at historical sites in the vicinity of their manufacture, and local Indigenous weaving techniques function within an unbroken line of traditional familial wisdom. The weaving culture of the Zapotec Nation of Oaxaca now exists at the juncture of multivalent competing visual, economic and cultural mediators, which makes for a compelling case study to examine the impacts of globalization, as well as the preservation of creative and cultural autonomy. This article describes site visits to Zapotec weaving ateliers, and also examines the history of Zapotec weaving traditions, and contemporary community engagement within these (now globalized) processes. The methodology employed is an object-based exploration of a Zapotec weaving. Fieldwork was conducted in the winter of 2019. It included an ethnographic observation of master Zapotec weavers within their ateliers; an observation of the original design inspirations at pre-Columbian architectural sites; artefact observation at the Museo Textil de Oaxaca; as well as practice-led natural dye research. Textile weaving is a natural site for the study of political agency and ‘cultural citizenship’, as it functions within a structure that safeguards traditional knowledge, as well as collectivizes local labourers within production flows.

This article examines the role of digital video in fashion research. It makes a case for the use of digital video as a valuable tool within the suite of research methods typically used in the field of fashion and dress. Its aim is to demonstrate that digital video can enrich studies of fashion, specifically in its capacity to assist the capture and analysis of visual material unavailable to unmediated perception. Central to this is the technology’s ability to document the dressed body in movement. The article discusses outcomes of a video-based methodology with reference to participatory research activities termed ‘sartorial sessions’. The approach used digital video technology to make possible the collection, analysis and manipulation of embodied material for a close interpretation and analysis as well as for others to encounter. The article demonstrates the way digital media, when used in conjunction with practice-oriented methods, opens up new ways to understand and research the body in fashion. It concludes with reflection on how revelation of a background sartorial vitality opened up by digital technology can shift understanding of fashion from commodities or signs involved in the transmission of messages about wearers, or aesthetic propositions to powerful tools shaping our encounters in the world.

Review of: Fashion Stylists: History, Meaning and Practice, Ane Lynge-Jorlén (ed.) (2020)

London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 272 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-35011-505-7, h/bk, £76.50

Review of: Fashioning China: Precarious Creativity and Women Designers in Shanzhai Culture, Sara Liao (2020)

London: Pluto Press, 203 pp.,

ISBN 978-0-74534-069-2, h/bk, £75.00

ISBN 978-0-74534-070-8, p/bk, £29.99

Review of: Contemporary Indonesian Fashion: Through the Looking Glass, Alessandra Lopez y Royo (2020)

London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 216 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-35006-130-9, h/bk, £76.50

ISBN 978-1-35023-795-7, p/bk, £26.09