Fashionscapes

For at least two centuries, fashion and art have maintained a competitive love-hate relationship. Both fashion and art construct imaginary worlds, and use a language of style to invigorate beliefs, perceptions and ideas. Until now the crossovers of fashion and art have received only scattered treatment and suffered from a dearth of theorization. As an attempt to theorize the area, this collection of new and updated essays is the most well-rounded and authoritative to date. Some of the world's foremost scholars in the field are assembled here to explore the art-fashion nexus in numerous ways: from aesthetics and performance to masquerade and media. Original and inspiring, this book will not only secure 'art-fashion' as a discrete area of study, but also suggest new critical pathways for exploring their continuing cross-pollination. Fashion and Art is essential reading for students and scholars of fashion, art history and theory, cultural studies and related fields.

Twenty-first century fashion practice has become increasingly borderless and diverse in the digital era, calling into question the very boundaries that define fashion in the Western cultural context. Borderless Fashion Practice: Contemporary Fashion in the Metamodern Age principally engages the work of four fashion designers -- Virgil Abloh, Aitor Throup, Iris Van Herpen, and Eckhaus Latta -- whose work intersects with other creative disciplines such as art, technology, science, architecture, and graphic design. They do their work in what Vanessa Gerrie calls the metamodern age -- the time and place where the polarization between the modern and the postmodern collapses. Used as a framework to understand the current Western cultural zeitgeist, Gerrie's exploration of the work of contemporary practitioners and theorists finds blurred borders and seeks to blur them further, to the point of erasure.

The book highlights how the signs of fashion showcase stories, hybridations, forms of feeling, from the classics of fashion in cinema, to fashion as cultural tradition in the global world, to digital media. Based on a strong socio-semiotic method (Barthes, The Language of Fashion is the main reference), the book crosses some of the main aspects of the contemporary culture of the clothed body: from time and space, to gender, to fashion as cultural translation, to the narratives included in the media convergence of our age. According to Jurji Lotman, fashion introduces the dynamic principle into seemingly inert spheres of the everyday. Fashion’s unexpected function of overturning received meaning is conveyed through its collocation within the dynamic storehouse of what Lotman calls the “sphere of the unpredictable.” In this horizon, the concept of fashion as a worldly system of sense (Benjamin) generates different “worlds” through its signs.

Attitudes to fashion have changed radically in the twenty-first century. Dress is increasingly approached as a means of self-expression, rather than as a signifier of status or profession, and designers are increasingly treated as 'artists', as fashion moves towards art and enters the gallery, museum, and retail space. This book is the first to fully explore the causes and implications of this shift, examining the impact of technological innovation, globalization, and the growth of the internet. The End of Fashion focuses on the ways in which our understanding of fashion and the fashion system have transformed as mass mediation and digitization continue to broaden the way that contemporary fashion is perceived and consumed. Exploring everything from the rise of online shopping to the emergence of bloggers as power elites who have revolutionized the terrain of traditional fashion reportage, this volume anatomizes a world in which runway shows now compete with live-streaming, digital fashion films, Instagram, and Pinterest. Bringing together original, cutting-edge contributions from leading international scholars, this book is essential reading for students and scholars of fashion and cultural studies, as well as anyone interested in exploring the dramatic shifts that have shaken the fashion world this century – and what they might say about larger changes within an increasingly global and digital society.

This unique text offers a holistic, insightful and timely exploration of sustainable practices across the fashion industry. The book takes the reader logically through each part of the authors’ new Responsible 9 FrameworkTM, providing a clear perspective and examples for each component. The framework thoroughly explains the move away from a singular product commercial focus to a Conscious Item approach and Circular Services business mindset. An organisation’s people are at the heart of the new framework and have therefore been rebranded as Community. Next addressed is the Perceived Value of an item or brand, and how sustainable pricing initiatives actively influence consumer purchase. Insights into Accountable Systems are reviewed to examine the importance of responsible processes when considering and integrating a successful, sustainable supply chain into a fashion business. The section on Governance looks at the different global organisations available to fashion brands and customers alike, which support their transition into a responsible and sustainable future existence. The last two sections of the framework are labelled Storytelling Platforms and Honest Communication, where transparent and honest strategies are highlighted and discussed from a viewpoint of how modern brands are engaging and connecting to the new conscious consumer. For each of the nine aspects, contemporary case studies from global brands such as Stella McCartney, Zalando and Arc'teryx, alongside insights from current, leading experts within the fashion world, bring the theory to life. Showing how sustainability has been integrated throughout the entirety of the fashion business, this textbook is perfect for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students Fashion Management, Fashion Brand Management and Fashion Marketing, as well as reflective leaders and practitioners within the industry.

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.

This book represents the voices of scholars, fashion designers, bloggers and artists, which speak to the pervasive nature of fashion in matters of politics, history, economics, sociology, religion, art and identity in the twenty-first century.

“A revelation. Reclaiming fashion from its European history.” – Shane White With a focus on sub-Saharan Africa, Fashioning the Afropolis provides a range of innovative perspectives on global fashion, design, dress, photography, and the body in some of the major cities, with a focus on Lagos, Johannesburg, Dakar, and Douala. It contributes to the ongoing debates around the globalization of fashion and fashion theory by exploring fashion as a genuine urban phenomenon on the continent and among its diasporas. To date, “fashion” and “city” have not been systematically related to each other in the African context and, for too long, a western-centric gaze has dominated scholarship, resulting in the perception of Africa as provincial and its visual arts and textile cultures as static and folkloristic. This perspective is all the more distorted, given Africa's rich sartorial past. With a huge number of tailors ready to adapt and renew clothing, reshaping garments into contemporary styles, and many cities in Africa becoming hot-spots for a steadily growing and well-connected scene of fashion designers in the past 20 years, the time is ripe for a reevaluation and reconsideration of the fashionscapes of Africa. Leading scholars offer an updated empirical and theoretical foundation on which to base new and exciting research on sub-Saharan fashion, challenging perceptions and offering new insights.