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- Volume 4, Issue 1, 2013
Interactions: Studies in Communication & Culture - Volume 4, Issue 1, 2013
Volume 4, Issue 1, 2013
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Pre-transnationalism in dress, a methodology: The unique example of Hong Kong’s expatriate western women, 1960–1997
More LessAbstractThis paper seeks to outline ways in which the topic of transnationalism can be thoroughly explored by other researchers using as an example, research on the Hong Kong fashion system and especially the experience of expatriate Western women in using dress as a means of manifesting identities in the early period of transnationalisn and the period immediately preceding it. Issues of fashion leadership and hegemony are discussed, and particularly expatriate minority dress, together with: the appropriation of regional dress; binge shopping’; and women’s tailoring, all contributing to fashion in one of Asia’s world cities.
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From bag ladies to bathing apes: Japanese interventions in British sartorial culture
More LessAbstractSince 1980 Japanese designers have built a solid, if understated, presence in the United Kingdom. This chapter examines the country’s interventions in British sartorial culture in the arenas of designer fashion, high-street apparel and sub-cultural style from three inter-related perspectives. The first considers the curatorial context of exhibitions that featured a cohort of avant-garde designers. The second addresses contrasting commercial strategies adopted by Japanese designers that involved mobilizations of traditional culture as ‘unique selling points’ and infiltration of the domestic market through collaborations with British apparel makers. The third documents visual consumption of creative outputs mediated through the styling regimes of the fashion periodical, and identifies a gendered differentiation in representations of Japanese fashion design. The conclusion suggests that, in an increasingly cosmopolitan creative milieu, interpretations of British sartorial heritage have become the province of ‘outsiders looking in’.
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Re-producing western goods for transnational markets: Case studies in rebranding and revaluing second-hand clothes
More LessAbstractIn an age of consumer plenty, the over abundance of clothing available to western consumers has, through rapid cycles of consumption and disposal, generated a surfeit of unwanted, yet clearly still useful, second-hand clothing. While some of these garments are sold in charity shops, many find their way to commercial sorters who specialize in transforming these waste items to wanted, and resalable, goods in new contexts. This is done by adding value to the garments, through selection from the waste pile, by giving further care through washing or mending, and by specially choosing new market outlets for optimum resale. Through these means, old clothes are effectively rebranded with a metaphorical quality mark of the person or company reprocessing them. Based on three case studies with middlemen resellers who operate on local, national and transnational scales, this article shows that the reinvigoration of second-hand clothes is embedded in person-to-person and person-to-clothing relations, whereby new value is given to old clothes that often supersedes the designations of brand names and labels granted during original production.
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From Gallant Little Belgium to Elegant Little Belgium: The creation and marketing of fashions from the flat country
More LessAbstractThis article examines the enduring myth of the Antwerp Six. By consulting primary sources it revisits the circumstances under which The Six burst onto the international fashion scene and repositions their story into a wider narrative of marketing and branding.
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The Wonders of Norwegian Wool
Authors: Marie Hebrok and Ingun G. KleppAbstractThis article draws from research undertaken as part of the Valuing Norwegian Wool project. Here, we will discuss the Norwegianess of Norwegian wool as found and used in Norwegian wardrobes following a wardrobe studies methodology. As a method, the wardrobe study aims to consider the materiality of garments in clothes research outside of but in addition to more usual studies of dress. Analysing the materiality of objects in connection with the social and cultural aspects of clothing facilitates a greater knowledge of the relations between materiality and practice (object and wear). This article addresses the fundamental questions and responses arising from this project: What constitutes Norwegian wool in the minds of Norwegians? How are material, cultural and social aspects of wool co-produced, and how do they relate to each other?
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Cole’s from Newcastle
More LessAbstractCheryl Cole – ex-judge of UK TV’s The X Factor (Freemantle Media Ltd, 2004-present), ex-WAG of Chelsea and England footballer Ashley Cole, celebrated Geordie, sometime singer, fulltime ‘style icon’ and possessor of aspirational hair – represents a prime example of a hegemonic performance of femininity that is being normalized and presented as desirable by the mass media in the United Kingdom and beyond. This article examines the ambivalent relationship between class, power, regional identity and beauty that is Cole embodies.
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The Wigan Dandy: Promenading the dance hall via Detroit and Paris
More LessAbstractIn this short article, I intend to consider the transnationalism inherent within the Northern Soul movement of the 1970s. By contextualizing the sociocultural climate from which this group emerged, the article will argue that by challenging masculinity through performance and dress practices, Northern Soul devotees borrowed not merely from the disaffected black ghettos of Detroit, but from the streets of nineteenth-century Paris.
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Review
By Susie RalphAbstract‘l’eleganza In Esilio: Tra Moda E Costume, Il Tempo Di Djagilev’/‘elegance In Exile: Between Fashion And Costume In The Time Of Diaghilev’, Museo Di Palazzo Mocenigo, Venice, 17 September 2011–6 January 2012
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