Fashion Exploring Critical Issues

This ebook is an inter-disciplinary collection of topics representing conventional and unconventional approaches to fashion studies, exposing a wide variety of methodological perspectives from fields including anthropology, history, art history, sociology, and material culture.

From the style statements of Michelle Obama, Beyonce, Jimi Hendrix, Gothic Lolitas and Hussein Chalayan; to those created by internet gamers, 'foodies,' supermodel 'corpses,' Jamaican designers, and spandex-wearing disco divas; to those worn by Congo immigrants in Italy, Russians nostalgic for the Soviet empire, Chinese women of the Republican era, and Dutch women reconciling the dictates of Paris with life in the Netherlands, fashion is a critical aspect of the zeitgeist of modern society. Reflecting contemporary preoccupations, fashion transmits cultural identities, mentalities, anxieties, and uncertainties as individuals seek to define, challenge, or reinvent cultural selves and dictums. The study of fashion is actually the study of fashions, hence the title Fashions: Exploring Fashion through Cultures. Culture threads its way through the fourteen chapters of this interdisciplinary book, which is divided into three sections: Transformations, Transnationalism and Transgressions. Representing a broad range of disciplines, the book's contributors dialogue with each other about the variety and complexity of fashion as a shared, patterned, and stylized form of cultural expression that provides meaning, order, identity, livelihood, aesthetic enjoyment - and frustration and challenges - to human lives.

There is widespread rhetorical agreement that the fashion industry must get itself onto a more sustainable footing. What does this mean in practice, and how can sustainability be achieved in different regions around the world? This book brings together expert scholars and reflective practitioners via a network of dialogue and exchange to help drive forward a sustainable future for the fashion industry. With a focus on technological innovation, the contributions to this book provide a range of case studies from design thinking, through digital clothing and inclusive fashion. This book will be of interest to researchers and scholars in the fields of circular business and the fashion industry, and provides a unique resource for readers seeking to understand more about the need for responsible fashion and how technology might be able to help.

Exploring the Critical Issues of Beauty offers a wide range of topics on concepts of Beauty from scholars, academics and researchers around the world.

This interdisciplinary book aims to advance knowledge in the field of fashion studies. It offers diverse perspectives on fashion related to identity formation, fashion's industries, theory, and media.

This book is a modern exploration of how we engage with fashion today. Through a series of articles this book shows the ‘ways’ through which we can approach fashion. The articles are organized around the following six sections: marketing, consuming, educating, communicating, embodying and positioning - each with a mix of research approaches and strategies. From sustainability and consumerism to street-style and street-food. From how fashion is taught across the globe to how fashion is communicated through photography and the media. We invite the readers to be curators themselves, and to create their own ‘augmented knowledge’ of fashion, by reading the varied themes in this book. Contributors are Claire Allen, Deidra Arrington, Naomi Braithwaite, Jill Carey, Federica Carlotto, Karen Dennis, Doris Domoszlai, Linsday E. Feeny, Nádia Fernandes, Jacque Lynn Foltyn, Alessia Grassi, Chris Jones, Lan Lan, Peng Liu, Mario Matos Ribeiro, Natalie C. McCreesh, Alex McIntosh, Alice Morin, Nolly Moyssi, Maria Patsalosavvi, Laura Petican, Jennifer Richards, Susanne Schulz, Ines Simoes, Helen Storey, Steve Swindells, Stephen Wigley, Gaye Wilson and Cecilia Winterhalter.

This volume was first published by Inter-Disciplinary Press in 2013. Fashion-Wise offers an interdisciplinary and transcultural approach to the phenomenon of fashion, investigating its historical, socio-political and artistic aspects. The chapters collected in the volume discuss fashion in the contexts of personal and national identity, gender politics, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, history, consumer culture, ethics, education, performance studies, authenticity, disability studies, sport and celebrity culture. The authors included in this seven-part volume not only comment on the ways in which we have been ‘consuming’ fashion across centuries and cultures but also explore its relevance as a critical subject in cultural studies.

Fashion, and the growth of fashion, are presented as the manifestation of a process of civilization, within a capitalist culture (capital understood as material possessions) that has become global and imperialist, of which - in an economic sense - the industry (or the fashion system?) functions as one of its main instruments of exploitation. And with respect to design, Arturo Escobar said: "Can design detach itself from its roots in modernist practices of unsustainability and defuturization and reorient itself towards other commitments, practices, narratives and ontological enactions? Moreover, can design be part of the toolkit for the transition to the pluriverze (i.e. a world in which many worlds can fit)?" This book presents the importance of cultural sustainability in the textiles and fashion industry, decolonizing fashion system and promotes the design for transitions.