Summary

Dedicated to the interdisciplinary study of fashion from an academic perspective, the quarterly journal Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture views fashion as a cultural phenomenon, off ering the reader a wide range of articles by leading Western and Russian specialists, as well as classical texts on fashion theory. From the history of dress and design to body practices; from the work of well-known designers to issues around consumption in fashion; from beauty and the fashionable figure through the ages to fashion journalism, fashion and PR, fashion and city life, art and fashion, fashion and photography — Fashion Theory covers it all.

In this issue’s Dress section we offer Silvano Mendes’ paper The Instagrammability of the Runway: Architecture, Scenography, and the Spatial Turn in Fashion Communications. From minimalist installation to monumental set design, runway scenography is now central to the grammar of fashion communications. Often used to symbolize the power of the brand or to reaffirm its DNA, the strategic choices of setting, space, and set design are an integral part of the promotion of designer fashion. Today’s runway show does not simply present a collection of clothes against a background set design; it uses scenography more instrumentally as the setting for brands and digital influencers to capture images of fashion for followers of online social media. Architectural paradigms now feed into the symbolic discourse of branded fashion and influence the way in which collections are spectacularized for diff erent audiences. This article analyses the strategic use of runway scenography as a key part of contemporary branded communications, exploring specifically how the creative synergies between fashion and architecture are being reshaped by the impact of digital social media, in particular by Instagram*.

Per Strömberg’s article Industrial Chic: Fashion Shows in Readymade Spaces. The staging concept of adaptive reuse is a strategy that is being repeated at many fashion weeks, creating a subgenre of alternative runway spaces. Why does the fashion industry locate its runway shows in obsolete factories, derelict subway stations, and worn-out warehouses? The spectacular show of H&M in 2001, staged in an old limestone quarry in Sweden, is used as a point of reference for this discussion which is centered on the question: how are cultural reuse values being negotiated, reproduced, and commodified? The author considers the postindustrial fashion show space to be a “readymade space” in the terminology of art theory. These runway spaces are a part of an overall “cultural economy of reuse” for which cultural intermediators play a significant role. The main conclusion of this paper is that adaptive reuse has several functions, of which the aesthetic is most important because of its potential for evoking “authenticity” and subcultural “creativity.” Here, adaptive reuse is a sort of re-appropriation of the subversive tactics of the artistic avant-garde, of new social movements, and of alternative urban lifestyles. Their subversive expression is spatially converted into a stylistic contrast or a lifestyle statement, which can then be converted into economic capital.

Chris Hesselbein’s article Walking the Catwalk: From Dressed Body to Dressed Embodiment. Studies on the relationship between body and dress have merely scratched the surface of the lived experience and bodily practice of dress. I argue for moving beyond the “dressed body” towards “dressed embodiment” by complementing analyses of representation and discourse with research on bodily practice and bodily experience. An important starting point for such an endeavor is the notion of “body techniques” and its relation to the concept of “habitus” as developed by Mauss, Bourdieu, and Crossley. Using an ethnographic study of fashion models learning and performing the high-heeled catwalk in New York City, the negotiation between body and dress is fl eshed out in detail. By analyzing how the catwalk is articulated, transmitted, and performed by catwalk coaches as well as by models in specifi c socio-material contexts, the interaction between dress, technique, and sociality is highlighted as an embodied practice that relates to the performance of gender and esthetic labor. These findings suggest how Fashion Studies can employ a more embodied approach both to the study of dress and to the development of a more dynamic and sensual understanding of identity.

This issue’s Body section revolves around movement, gesture and pose. It opens with Ekaterina Mikhailova-Smolniakova’s Movement, Gesture, Dress: Social Dance and Norms of Noble Behaviour in Italy in the Second Half of the Sixteenth Century. Late sixteenth-century texts on general matters of upbringing and behaviour in the royal court could not be relied upon to include detailed descriptions of the etiquette governing courtly dress and accessories. The authors of the first printed manuals on social dance, however, often touched on vestimentary matters in putting across to their readers the art of dance. At that time in Italy, the etiquette that governed balls and evenings at home with dancing was barely different to the ‘everyday’ norms of noble behaviour. Thus, the comments of the dance masters, unique as they were in their detailed descriptions, can be used to glean much wider information on what went on well beyond the ballroom. In their writings, choreographers and dance teachers Fabritio Caroso and Cesare Negri describe the rules that governed various details of dress both whilst moving — walking, dancing or greeting an acquaintance — and whilst resting or waiting for a dance. The dance manuals ‘The Dance Master’ (‘Il Bailarino’) (1581), ‘The Nobility of Ladies’ (‘Nobilta di Dame’) (1600) and ‘The Graces of Love’ (‘Le Gratie D’Amore’) (1602) offer ample information on various nuances in the wearing of shoes, hats, coats, gloves and other elements of the Italian nobleman’s wardrobe.

Penelope Rook’s paper Fashion Photography and Photojournalism: Posing the Body in Vu. The first issue of the French photographic journal Vu (1928–1940) stated, in a manifesto of intent, that it would reflect: ‘le rythme précipité de la vie actuelle’. The director, Lucien Vogel, had begun his career working in fashion publications and his wife, Cosette de Brunhoff , was the first editor of French Vogue in 1920. Vogel and his wife were directly engaged in recording fashion styles for the magazine’s special editions. His stable of photographers included Kertész, Man Ray, Tabard, Saad, d’Ora and Krull. They produced innovative fashion shoots in response to the advances made in publishing and photography at the end of the 1920s. They experimented with montage techniques and explored the potential of the new lightweight cameras. The covers they created could include celebrities and students; the focus of their work ranged from haute couture to investigative journalism. This gave the work more edge in comparison with the more composed mis-en-scène produced at the time for Vogue. For example, the diversity of Kertész’s portfolio ranged from models at Longchamp (1929) to stylish students at the Sorbonne (1933), indicators of traditional glamour and street fashion. The choice of specific locations such as these encouraged more natural body movements which, together with faster shutter speeds, affected the recording of the pose.

Karen de Perthuis and Rosie Findlay offer their paper on How Fashion Travels: The Fashionable Ideal in the Age of Instagram*. Despite the many transformations in aesthetics and technologies that fashion photography has undergone since its spread as an influential cultural form in the early twentieth century, one constant has always held fast: that the imagery depicts a fashionable ideal. The look of the fashionable ideal is, of course, ever subject to change. However, there are qualities that are always present: the body is subject to the authority of fashion, limitations to the autonomy of the body such as gravity or ageing are absent, and the figure is imbued with possibility and mutability, even as it freezes a momentary state of perfection. These qualities become particularly marked in the present era, in which digital influencers simultaneously assume the roles of cultural producer, model and consumer while implicitly embodying the fashionable ideal. At the moment of their publication, the labor of producing these images seems to evaporate, as bodies with no material limitation are presented with immediacy, and fi gure, commodity and surrounds collapse into one.

This article interrogates how we can conceive of the labor of appearance and being in the fashion image, and considers how this style of fashion imagery draws on visual rhetoric of prior eras of fashion photography and is structured by the existing power relations of capitalism and the human and non-human actors of media technologies. In so doing, the concept of the fashionable ideal is explored in one of its contemporary iterations as fluid, aspirational, global, simultaneously embodied and disembodied.

Todd Robinson in his paper Attaining Poise: A Movement-based Lens Exploring Embodiment in Fashion. makes a case for increased dialogue between the visual-, sensory-, and material-based methods currently available within social research and modes of socio-cultural enquiry typically used in fashion studies. Its aim is to demonstrate that studies of embodiment in fashion can be enriched by approaches that integrate the making and use of fashion garments as well as the tactile and kinesthetic experiences of bodies that wear them in investigations of embodied experience. The article outlines a movement-based perspective developed with reference to a series of participatory activities best described as “sartorial sessions.” When combined with digital video technology, these sessions make it possible to read the sartorial movements of the body with a precision unavailable to unmediated perception. Th e article demonstrates the way visual-, material-, and sensory-based empirical work in embodiment opens new ways to understand and explore the body in fashion. Th e article concludes by introducing Poise, a dynamic modality which realizes a shift in focus from cultural analysis of the body towards explorations of the body in fashion as an adaptive and sensory structure.

The Culture section this time around looks at certain sartorial practices in early Soviet times focusing and opens with Natalia Lebina’s Gangster Fashion, Proletarian- Style: Vestimentary Signs of the Asocial in 1920s Soviet City Space. The author looks back at the development of mobster fashion and the emergence of special vestimentary signs denoting the wearer’s belonging to a clearly asocial group. Lebina’s study focuses on a clear chronological period in a very specific geographic location. Her research centres on the appearance of criminals in Soviet Russia or, to be more precise, in the major Soviet cultural and economic centre, Petrograd (later Leningrad) in the first decade of the new state under proletarian dictatorship. At that time, as is well known, the authorities ascribed to various types of clothing a range of ideological labels. Wearers of particular styles of dress were seen as politically unreliable or socially inadequate. Even before the revolution, the Russian criminal world had developed traits of a distinct subculture. The revolution of 1917 brought about shifts in the accepted vestimentary codes of the asocial criminal milieu. Under military Communism, the clothing worn by robbers and gangsters no longer denoted status or affiliation to a particular group, but was deliberately designed to inspire fear. A particularly clear example can be seen in the appearance of the ‘jumping’ gang of ‘living corpses’ (‘poprigunchiki’). During the New Economic Policy (NEP) years, criminals on the whole tried not to stand out from the crowd. In the 1920s, on the other hand, hooligans tended to wear striking, eye-catching outfits which stressed their collective asocial stance. The clothing worn by hooligans at that time combined revolutionary and criminal features. Despite their very real existence, however, the various elements of ‘gangster fashion, proletarian-style’ were not incorporated into the fashionable attire of the upstanding Soviet urban citizen.

Philip Lekmanov’s ‘Invisible Heroes’ and ‘Proletarian Fops’: Th e Vestimentary Practices of (Non)Soviet Youth in 1920s Soviet Press and Literature looks at the ways in which Soviet youth was represented in 1920s media and literature. The author’s primary source of interest is Smena, one of the main youth magazines of that time. The first decade aft er the revolution saw the active construction of new ‘socialist’ cultural and aesthetic norms. The Soviet media actively promoted the cultural transformation of Soviet society. The descriptions of youth in magazines and satirical articles served to form a particular aesthetic canon which, whilst legitimizing certain vestimentary practices, tended to stigmatise others. Examining the images promoted by the Soviet press of the ascetic young Komsomol member and of his fashionable antipode, the author reconstructs the cultural context in which the vestimentary practices of real Soviet youth were formed.

Using Perm Fashion House as an example, in The Production of Fashion in the Late Socialist Years: A View fr om a Provincial Fashion House, Yulia Papushina looks at the production of fashion in regional fashion houses in the late Socialist period. To this day, the work of Soviet regional fashion houses and provincial designers has barely been studied by researchers, despite the fact that the regional fashion house system was an important element of official Soviet fashion. For her analysis of the functioning of the Perm House of Fashion, Papushina uses Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of the fi eld of production, as well as the concept of fashion market identity developed by Patrik Aspers. Papushina’s study constitutes the first attempt to apply sociological approaches in the analysis of fashion production, to Soviet fashion. Empirically, the study is based on archive documents and interviews with former staff members from the Perm House of Fashion. Papushina’s research confirms the existence both of a mass production field, and of limited production fields in Soviet fashion. At the same time, however, it also highlights differences between these fields, on the one hand, and the constructs of Pierre Bourdieu, on the other. The professional identity of Soviet designers was formed not only by their belonging to the production field, but also by the hegemony of Soviet ideology.

In this issue’s Practice of Fashion column, Ksenia Gusarova offers On Portraits of Solitude, the Patriotic Language of the Body, and the Skin of Images: An Interview with Yana Romanova.

In the Museum Business column, Emma McClendon contributes The Body: Fashion and Physique — A Curatorial Discussion. Curatorial practice is a complex process that aims to educate visitors through objects, text, display, and design as they move through a three-dimensional gallery space. This essay offers a view into the planning of The Body: Fashion and Physique exhibition, which was on view at The Museum at The Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) from December 5, 2017–May 5, 2018, and which also acted as a catalyst for this special issue of Fashion Theory. I discuss key objects from the show and consider their historical significance in tandem with theoretical issues that formed the basis of the exhibition’s concept. I also explore some of the challenges that arose for me during the curatorial process, such as grappling with the typical display practices of a fashion museum. A goal of this essay, as well as this issue more broadly, is to open a frank dialog within the fashion studies community about the role the museum can play in both challenging and perpetuating narratives about body size, aging, ability, race, and gender identity in fashion.

In this issue’s Events section, Ekaterina Vasilieva offers The Principle of the Object. In Buy Sneakers or Go To the Museum? Lauren Downing Peters shares her thoughts on ‘Virgil Abloh: Figures of Speech’ at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), Chicago, Illinois (10 June — 22 September 2019).

In the Books section this time around, we have Roberto Filippello’s Queer in Fashion: A History, in which the author reviews Work! A Queer History of Modeling by Elspeth H. Brown (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019).

Ian Gilligan presents What Clothes Mean, his take on Being Prepared: Aspects of Dress and Dressing by Michael Carter (Sydney: Puncher & Wattmann, 2017).

* Instagram / Facebook принадлежит компании Meta Platforms Inc., которая признана в России экстремистской организацией, ее деятельность на территории РФ запрещена.