International Journal of Fashion Studies - Special Section: Fashion Tales, Apr 2022

The textile industry is characterized by global mass production and has an immense impact on the environment. One garment can travel around the world through an extensive value chain before reaching its final consumption destination. The consumer receives little information about how the item was produced due to a lack of policy regulation. In this article, we explore understandings of ‘local clothing’ and how the concept could be an alternative to the current clothing industry. The analysis is based on fifteen interviews with eighteen informants from Western Norway as part of the research project KRUS about Norwegian wool. Five ways of understanding local clothing were identified from the interviews: production, place-specific garments, local clothing habits, home-based production and local circulation. We lack a language with which to describe local clothing that covers local forms of production as an alternative to current clothing production. As such, the article highlights an important obstacle to reorganization: local clothing needs a vocabulary among the public, in politics and in the public sector in general, with which to describe the diverse production processes behind clothing and textiles and their material properties.

The visual politics of fashion has again become a topic of interest to scholars working both inside and outside the realm of fashion studies, although many, like this author, actually bow to Jennifer Craik’s ground-breaking study The Face of Fashion (1994). This article introduces the notion extended power dressing as a way to further the scholarly study of contemporary female executives’ brand of power dressing in the aftermath of John T. Molloy’s 1980s matrix for successful ‘wardrobe-engineering’. In line with previous studies of the sartorial dress code represented by women in power, this article features a pertinent example from yet another social arena, in the form of the unprecedented couture gowns worn by the late permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, Sara Danius, at the Nobel Festivities in Stockholm between 2015 and 2018. The author suggests that these frocks are materialized visions of Danius’ intellectual wit and cultural taste, thus representing a visual articulation of her powerful rank. An important characteristic pertaining to Danius’ extended power dressing is therefore that her situated dress practice, while advocating different practices of resistance and counter-conduct, refuted all sexualization of her as a female subject to the benefit of a self-authored and self-reflecting enfashioning technology. By detailing the intellectual process behind Danius’ gowns, as well as their performance in society, this study shows how power is behaving and how it is structured when comparing the conduct of a certain dominant discourse (in this case cultural tradition and misogyny) to the author’s proposed counter-discourse (resistance and female agency). The author suggests that the visual politics emerging from this meeting represent a unique female subculture adding yet another layer to the visual politics of fashion.

This article interrogates the reputation, prevalent to this day, of Balenciaga as being anti-advertising and anti-media, according to some of his contemporary journalists as well as some of his employees and clients. The study contextualizes Balenciaga in the framework of the influence of the fashion press and the reality of the French couture licensing business in the North American fashion market from 1937 to 1968, his years on the international scene. Based on the analysis of the issues of Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar and Women’s Wear Daily for the same period, the research demonstrates that the designer had not always been so scornful of the media. He really was a discreet man, but this does not mean he hated the press, as his designs often appeared in the most influential fashion magazines. The article argues that the negative view in the media’s perception of him was generalized after his veto to the press in January 1956 – a decision he took for business reasons – and was retroactively attributed to his entire professional life.

This study examines the factors that promote lookism on YouTube fashion channels as well as the influence of video watching by analysing media viewers experiencing lookism in Korean society. Young Korean women in their 20s who subscribe to YouTube fashion channels were interviewed. On these fashion channels, viewers’ herd mentality is stimulated by videos about certain looks or slender physiques and plastic surgery, while the comments highlight the importance of one’s appearance, causing viewers to be concerned with others’ assessments of their looks. Compared with celebrities, beauty/fashion YouTubers share ordinary themes and familiarize themselves with viewers, eventually becoming objects of social comparison and standards of ideal beauty in Korea. Viewers’ consistent exposure to these videos causes them to compare their socio-economic conditions regarding appearance management with those of the YouTubers. Meanwhile, the positive appearance-related values and healthy appearance management of some YouTubers enable their viewers to recognize diversity in appearance and independently participate in appearance management, thus increasing confidence in viewers’ appearance and reinforcing their use of beauty/fashion YouTube content to discover their own tastes. Research has shown that YouTube videos and YouTubers can affect one’s perception and attitude towards personal appearance and confirmed that the influence of YouTube fashion channels on society is growing as an emerging discourse on appearance management based on diversity. This study finds that fashion-related content on YouTube substantially affects viewers’ different perceptions of looks, appearance management behaviours and appearance-related values. This study has implications for social media studies by suggesting the need to constantly examine YouTube, a medium that reflects the phenomenon of lookism in Korean society.

This qualitative study examines the role played by facial cosmetics or make-up in the (re)creation and expression of self-image and identity for six older, white women. Although there has been increasing interest in notions of appearance management and body image creation as these relate to older women, there have been few studies that specifically investigate the role and function of make-up for this cohort. This study, albeit small scale, is nonetheless rich and illuminative. It is contextualized by a detailed literature review that provides important historical and contemporary background to the in-depth interviews, which were conducted with older women. The themes of ritual, self-presentation and change that emerge from our results characterize the relationship of these older women with their make-up. Make-up for our interviewees was used as a source of comfort and for personal enjoyment, as well as to look good, rather than to attract the male gaze or as a means to resist ageing. The older women at the centre of this study use make-up in ways that may be considered ritualized, and it was associated with the expression and performance of their identity. Make-up was thus found to be central to the creation of the women’s self-image; all interviewees felt more confident about facing the world when made-up. Rather than being a mask behind which the women hide, for these women make-up is an essential part of who they are and a means of expressing their identities.

This article explores three recent cases of alternative, critical fashion practices from the Netherlands that create more agency for makers, wearers and matter. The cases are as follows: (1) the project ‘JOIN Collective Clothes’ by designer Anouk Beckers; (2) the ‘Feminist Needlework Party’; and (3) ‘The Linen Project’. By facilitating collective, participatory practices of making, these cases explore how to give more attention to the actual material aspects of textiles and clothes – and especially to the material aspects of making that hardly get any attention in a globalized market-driven fashion industry. All case studies highlight different material practices of working with matter – e.g. growing flax or doing needlework – that we have generally lost touch with in western consumer culture. In order to develop a deeper understanding of the importance of offering more attention to matter, these case studies have been analysed by drawing upon the theoretical discourse of ‘new materialism’ as well as the theoretical notion of ‘making-with’. By exploring these participatory cases of making-with, this article aims to offer more attention to the material aspects of fashion beyond a consumerist conception – showing how agency matters.

Relying on empirical data from two research projects on CrossFit and parkour, and adopting mixed methods (enactive ethnography, participant observation, online survey and social media analysis), this article aims at evidencing the role of apparel and gear in some processes engendering a transformation of the two practices. We investigate the making of boundaries – internal and external to the practices – that furnish ways of belonging to practitioners, focusing on how the processes of sportification and commodification are involved in these different ways of belongingness. We link these general processes to their connections with clothing, accessories and their material and symbolic use, showing how informational capital is at stake in this.

Dress is an embodied experience which is dematerialized online. In a fashion e-commerce website, clothes cannot be touched, nor worn prior to purchase and delivery; this engenders issues of fit and thus, returns. To solve this issue, fashion companies are turning to size recommendation and virtual fit service platforms. Simply put, virtual fit systems algorithmically match customer body data to fashion items which are potentially the right size and fit. This process aims to create value for all parties involved: for brands, by improving customer satisfaction and reducing returns; for customers, by facilitating choices; and for platform providers, by the sale of services and tools. However, as research in online platforms in other fields suggests (van Dijck 2014: 197; van Dijck et al. 2018), virtual fit services are driven by mechanisms of datafication, curation and commodification of fashion consumers’ bodily data – which in turn raise issues related to privacy and inclusivity. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, virtual fit platforms and their effects on the datafication of dress embodiment have heretofore not been discussed in fashion studies literature. This article spotlights the growing phenomena, opening avenues for further research in the field.