International Journal of Fashion Studies - Current Issue

Decolonial fashion research has become more prominent in recent years, mainly focusing on demonstrating the coloniality of fashion and fashion studies, or exploring decolonial alternatives in fashion. In this article I will concentrate on how these colonial attitudes arise. Non-western dress collected in western museums has been cut off from the meshwork of relations of the source community in which it came into being. It is kept ‘out of touch’, guarded by modern western museum practices. Unlike pieces of dress collected by institutions, privately acquired textiles can be touched and even worn, offering the possibility of using haptic and affective engagement to relate with a textile. The case study for this article is an antique Sumatran Batak ikat ulos that I bought in a local thrift store, permitting such a haptic approach that I call a material-affective analysis. The aim of this analysis is to uncover colonial affects and feelings that influence the relation between me and the ulos. I combine this with a biography of things to provide historical context and to place the ulos at the centre of the shifting relational networks it was part of in the Dutch East Indies and the Netherlands. I see this as a decolonial strategy that aims to re-animate a Toba Batak textile endowed with affective and agential power while at the same time gaining insight into the lingering affects of coloniality that inform the western handling of non-western textiles.

This article aims to recontextualize the work of French fashion designer Sonia Rykiel from an affiliative point of view by disentangling the various relations caught up in the materialization of her designs. In her démode manifesto from 1977, Rykiel states that her design practice was a way of ‘translating the political mood of the day’, a statement against fashion’s time-based hierarchies of trends and diktats. Through a concentric, relational reading of these creations, informed by mood theory, as well as feminist notions related to the sociocultural milieu of Rykiel, such as Hélène Cixous’s notion of écriture feminine and Antoinette Fouque’s libido creandi, the article aims to draw out the importance of a relational perspective for fashion studies. By elucidating how a design poetic can express the changes in mood of a certain time, place and sociocultural milieu, we can understand how it can, in turn, affect this milieu and its mood.

Silk production and consumption in Cambodia nearly halted during the Khmer Rouge regime (1975–79), and resumed in the post-conflict era under global and local dynamics that combined heritage and preservation policies with social and economic development. In the 1990s, foreign investment and humanitarian aid heavily changed the practice and significance of silk weaving and dress. Extant literature on Cambodian textile production and dress practices remains fragmented and limited in scope, either discussing silk weaving as a traditional practice or providing general facts and figures on the state of contemporary production as a struggling domestic industry. This article proposes to reframe the domestic commodity chain of Cambodian silk as a transnational network of exchanges, funding, textiles, fibre resources and actors inside and outside Cambodia, while also incorporating diasporic communities in the United States. It does so by using Appadurai’s theorization of globalized flows and scapes and the de-hierarchized methodological approach of Actor-Network Theory to remap this cottage industry into a dynamic silkscape. The Cambodian silkscape incorporates the circulation of materials, skills, designs and people alike, including numerous stakeholders – weavers, middlemen, craft companies, international non-governmental organizations and wearers, such as locals, tourists and Cambodians in the diaspora. This post-conflict landscape remains influenced by pre-existing Cambodian social and kinship systems such as the khsae, which means ‘threads’ or ‘network’ in Khmer. These invisible contractual links tying humans in unequal power relationships underpin the production and transfer of silk resources in Cambodia. By investigating the inner organizational, material and social flows activating the Cambodian silkscape, this article aims to highlight the frictions, interdependence and imbalances in the local and transnational connections between materials, makers and wearers. Overall, it demonstrates how these inequitable power relations affect Cambodian silk production and trade and prevent its development into a socially and economically sustainable model.

Renting is an emerging practice within the field of fashion. It is promoted as both a means to access aspirational high-end garments and a way in which to consume more sustainably. As self-proclaimed newcomers to the field, rental companies must forge a new space by demonstrating both their fashionable taste and sustainable credentials. To do so, they rely on a network of mediation which requalifies rented garments as sustainable by virtue of being shared. This requalification is not just carried out by the rental company but takes place between the relational practices among both human and non-human actors. This article presents ethnographic research tracing networks of fashion rental both online and offline including rental garments, those renting and sharing images online and the algorithm which prioritizes content. Discourse analysis of digital content, qualitative interviews with rental users and autoethnographic reflection are methods used to explore how understanding of sustainable fashion practices and objects are shaped by the interactions and relations within this network of mediation.

Researchers have recognized that dress displays the intersection of various influences affecting a society at any time. Dress reflects our interpretations of the physical setting, relationships (including with self), culture and known memory. Garments are also the culmination of their production processes – today, most dress is often tethered to spaces outside the society where they are used. In this sense, dress is both a localized indicator of the characteristics of its society and, more broadly, an indicator of the globalized fashion industry. The authors propose that a dress-led framework (DLF) is an unidentified strategy already used by those undertaking dress research. DLF is a conceptualization, data collection and analysis technique that begins with dress (e.g. written and visual representations, artefacts and practices) and capitalizes on the affiliative qualities of dress to discover, document and understand aspects of society and culture. This article first discusses how DLF is employed in common dress research methods. Then, the framework is illustrated with two case studies. The first example applies DLF to field research documenting dress practices in a Tz’utujil Maya municipality in the Guatemalan Highlands. The second example discusses DLF as applied to a material culture analysis of five extant European and Euro-American gowns from the 1790s to the 1820s. In both cases, leading with dress throughout the data collection process permitted the studies to move forward in a manner that revealed dress’ broader affiliations. Further leaning into the affiliative qualities of dress illuminated unexpected findings that might otherwise have gone unstudied. In summary, this article aims to recognize, exemplify and validate the affiliative dress-led approaches used by dress scholars.

In this piece, I set out to trace the contours of postfeminism in my upbringing. Believing it to be constitutive rather than manipulative of neo-liberal subjectivity, I reflect on the figure of the modern woman, from whom rigorous self-discipline and meticulous appearance management is not only expected but also constructed as pleasurable and freely chosen. In keeping with others, I believe she amounts to a sinister obfuscation of the heterosexist logics that subtend modern feminine subjectivities – and the political order itself. However, as I examine her, I realize she is ghosted by the paradoxical feminist potential of subjectivation through self-shattering. The modern woman is a site of self-authorization through citation, a process which undermines the construction of the neo-liberal subject as unitary, free and self-knowing. This undoes the very premise from which she emerges and postfeminism proceeds. While it has traditionally been the feminine’s vulnerability that has rendered it abject, the modern woman is a feminist figuration, a betrayal of the way there is no subjectivity not defined by its mediation through others – by its very objectification. She is a shape-shifting presence whose contours might only be mapped provisionally before she recedes into the surfaces that project her: a glimmer, a glamour.

Fashion is not only a tool for the creation and expression of individual identity and empowerment. It is additionally an active agent of socialization, and its ability to connect humans, non-humans and ideas in complex networks and interactions is equally important. The article analyses the phenomenon of affiliative fashion in the Polish sociocultural context, with a particular focus on the bonding role of fashion. It is based on the results of the author’s research carried out with the unique Zaltman metaphor elicitation technique (ZMET^©): study of attitudes towards fashion and the ways in which it is practised by Polish women (research carried out under an NCN grant in 2014–17) and Polish men (research carried out under a grant from the Faculty of Sociology of the Adam Mickiewicz University in 2021). The research and method formulated in this way facilitated the capture of multidimensional aspects of fashion along with various personal strategies, which makes these studies unique and extremely valuable.

In a 1935 photograph by Prentiss Taylor, the novelist and folklorist Zora Neale Hurston wears a black silk bolero and performs part of a Bahamian ‘Fire Dance’, collected as part of her anthropological fieldwork in the American South and Nassau. This visual essay proposes that Hurston’s fashionable dress (boleros are everywhere in 1935) and the cross-racial, queer modernist milieu of Taylor’s West Village apartment help visualize Hurston’s philosophy of history, specifically folklore as a collective, living history. Fashion more broadly helps shape and visualize historicity: the experience of history and of being in history. Crucially to the theme of this Special Issue, historicity as described here – drawing on theories from philosophy of history and phenomenology of history – is an experience of the self in relation to others. The piece uses extensive visual content to emphasize the role of Hurston’s dressed body in her version of historicity. It suggests we might think of this corporeal philosophy of history as ‘historiobody’, after Hayden White’s ‘historiophoty’. The essay was made using a web-based digital tool for telling multimedia stories that unfold on the reader’s browser, developed by Dr Suzanne Churchill (Davidson) and John-Michael Murphy. The format reflects the essay’s theory of historicity, in which clothes connect individuals to others in time and aspects of the past are remade in the present, creating a shared history in the making.

To perceive non-visuality in fashion and dress challenges any conventional theory, concept or framework defined by sighted scholars. Whereas fashion design has started to show interest in non-visual perspectives, empirically grounded literature in fashion studies that questions the predominance of visuality still remains limited. The overall aim of this essay is to discuss the reassessment of both perceiving and perceived bodies involved within research on fashion and dress. The essay uses in-depth conversations conducted among visually impaired women – whose relation to fashion and dress has been notably overlooked – as a means of enlightening this theme. While presenting various everyday ways of fashioning and dressing the body which are not primarily nor necessarily facilitated by the sense of sight, this essay attempts to introduce alternative methods to reconsider the positioning of the researcher’s body. The essay argues that giving voice and listening to the visually impaired challenges the emphasis put on the hegemonic position of seeing and the sociocultural fact of sight. Furthermore, the essay invites scholars and practitioners to discuss modalities and dynamics through which we all relate to fashion, dress and the sensate body.