International Journal of Fashion Studies - Current Issue

Significant discrimination is directed towards Muslim women who dress modestly. Despite this, Muslims around the world continue to spend tens of billions of dollars on modest fashion. Past research in modest fashion has focused on modest fashion influencers, the industry or on veiling. Muslim women’s everyday dress practices and their lived experiences have not been studied through an intersectional lens. Through an intersectional theoretical framework, this research uses wardrobe interviews with sixteen Muslim women to explore how they embody their identity through modest fashion, how intersectionality impacts their clothing choices and what contexts influence their sartorial decisions. Three themes emerge: what influences their style; how they shop and style outfits; and what consequences are faced. By prioritizing modesty as a sartorial practice, these women are diverting the western gaze, navigating away from superficial and oppressive western beauty ideals and challenging narrow Islamophobic stereotypes.

This article investigates the significance of the dressed, mobile body (alias the animate wearer) in the work of Cinzia Ruggeri (1942–2019), asserting that the artist-designer’s methods of showcasing fashion were shaped by her strong interest in movement and corporeality. Informed by an interdisciplinary research approach that intersects embodiment theory with several subfields of fashion studies (viz. fashion film and photography practice, fashion performance studies, clothing and embodiment), I illustrate how Ruggeri rejected the model-mannequin’s treatment as a voiceless body-object, choosing instead to present her clients as expressive and emancipated body-subjects. My perception of this approach as trailblazing is supported by contextualizing the agency-less history of the displayed female body and demonstrated by discussing the role of embodiment and personalization in Ruggeri’s abiti-installazione (‘dress-installations’). Expanding upon Guerriero’s reading of this work as ‘a dissolve of the disciplines’, I explore how Ruggeri’s discipline-dissolving approach informed her distinct presentation of the wearer, citing key examples from her 1980s catwalk shows, showroom-happenings and costumed productions. In constituting the first extended contemporary study of Ruggeri to be developed by a non-Italian researcher – and published outside of her native Italy – this article underscores her potential as a subject of global scholarly interest.

The study explores motivations for second-hand clothing practices using wardrobe interviews with a limited sample of twelve higher-education students in Belgium. Three types of practices were identified: bargain hunters, uniqueness searchers and ethical and ecological buyers. The study reveals that despite the perceived sustainability of second-hand clothes, these practices often result in large volumes of clothing purchases, contradicting sustainability motivations. Ecological respondents experience ‘affective dissonance’ due to a disconnection between their sustainability beliefs and fashion practices. These uncomfortable emotions reveal an aspiration to engage in more sustainable fashion practices in the future. Despite this, all respondents evaluate their second-hand clothing practices by relying on the culturally prevalent discourses of the first-hand fashion industry. The study concludes by highlighting the implications for the development of alternative and more sustainable fashion practices when second-hand clothing practitioners reproduce the symbolic boundaries that govern the first-hand fashion industry, and the authors suggest pathways to address these implications in the future.

In the spring of 2023, my father, Arturo, died of brain cancer at the age of 55, after a decade of illness. As he was dying, I began to process my anticipatory grief by writing about my emotional attachments to his clothing. Drawing on material culture, affect and design theory, this article looks at my family’s personal experience of my father’s illness and death to investigate the emotional possibilities and limits of garments belonging to palliative care patients and their loved ones. By looking closely at the material resonances of my father’s clothing while he died, this article explores how clothes reflect the confusing nature of time, grief and love when losing a parent to long-term illness. In theorizing the experience of losing a parent through a material culture lens, this article explores the liminality of anticipating a significant familial loss and the affective qualities of the garments that endure through it.

In Fashion at the Edge, Caroline Evans places the past and present in conversation to investigate 1990s fashion’s obsession with the spectacular, the apocalyptic and the melancholic. Drawing on Ulrich Lehmann and Barbara Burman Baines’s writing on fashion revivals, she reads the citation of historical imagery by designers such as Alexander McQueen, Walter Van Beirendonck and Hussein Chalayan as ‘not so much a backwards as a forwards glance’: a contemporary projection of fears of the future and a collective response to the nihilism arising from the sensation of sitting at the end of history. Fitting, then, that on the event of Fashion at the Edge’s reissue, we return to a work that has become something of a cult classic the world over. Twenty years after it was originally published, Caroline and I sat down to discuss the book in the context of a very different fashion landscape and question why fashion imagery is now less informed by themes of cruelty and deathliness, despite the ongoing persistence of collective anxiety and trauma.

Review of: The Intersection of Fashion and Disability: A Historical Analysis, Kate Annett-Hitchcock (2024)

London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 227 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-35014-311-1, h/bk, £75.00