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, offering 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 focus on issues of fashion and decolonial discourse and open with M. Angela Jansen’ s paper Fashion and the Phantasmagoria of Modernity: An Introduction to Decolonial Fashion Discourse.

Although eurocentrism in fashion studies has been contested for nearly four decades, the topic is as timely and urgent as ever. While critiques focus on symptoms such as discrimination, inequality and exploitation, the actual “decease,” the modernity/coloniality structure, persists. The way fashion, as a noun, is being defi ned according to a temporality (contemporaneity), a system (of power) and an industry (of capitalism) particular to modernity, coloniality is inherent to its definition. Whereas fashion as a verb, the act of fashioning the body, is of all temporalities and geographies and operates beyond the colonial difference. Decolonial fashion discourse constitutes a framework that enables to redefine fashion as a multitude of possibilities rather than a normative framework falsely claiming universality, to humble modernity’s narrative by recognizing its own epitomical limits, to listen to and acknowledge an episteme plurality outside of modernity and to decenter the production of knowledge in regard to fashion. It aims to critique the denial and erasure of a diversity of ways to fashioning the body due to unequal global power relations based on modern-colonial order, the Euro-American canon of normativity and the exploitation and abuse of cultural heritages, human beings and natural resources.

Sarah Cheang & Shehnaz Suterwalla contribute Decolonizing the Curriculum? Transformation, Emotion, and Positionality in Teaching. Decolonizing the curriculum involves more than broadening the canon and revising reading lists. In challenging Eurocentric frameworks and making definitions of “fashion” more inclusive, methods and approaches to teaching itself also require active reconceptualization in a closer questioning of the meaning of decolonized practice. This paper analyses experimental teaching within the MA History of Design program at the Royal College of Art, London, which aimed to explore decolonial praxis while training postgraduates to critique fashion historiography. The ambition was also to broaden students’ perspectives toward deeper reflexivity and wider professional development. We argue that the dismantling of Eurocentric bias and critiquing of institutional systems involves an uncomfortable unpicking of accustomed structures of knowledge that is both the ground zero and the end goal of decolonial histories. In modeling more collaborative modes of teaching, learning and writing, we suggest what a decolonized practice could look like for fashion studies, and the importance of emotion and position within a transformational potential.

Toby Slade closes the section with his paper on Decolonizing Luxury Fashion in Japan. Japan went from consuming more foreign luxury fashion brands than the rest of the world combined in the late 1980s to a complete rethinking of both the concept and practice of luxury after the bursting of its economic bubble. One key sensibility that arose was that of surōraifu, a Japanese word after the English “slow life.” This esthetic, expressing the slowing down of time, was part of rising cultural nationalism but also represented a delinking of Japanese fashion from modernity/coloniality’s horizon of expectations which positioned Europe as the font of desirable luxury consumption and European luxury fashion as a central symbol of civilization. This paper argues that in consumer culture Japan’s modernity was colonial in defining the most valuable things as the goods from a foreign culture and that perspective changing crises are able to question the values and change the tastes of consumers in line with a decolonial delinking.

In this issue’s Body section we explore the ambiguous body-fashion interaction, clothing as sensory experience and corporeality of the pandemic. We open the section with Anne Boultwood & Robert Jerrard’s article Ambivalence, and Its Relation to Fashion and the Body. Both the body and fashion are independently related to self-awareness, and the nature of their joint interaction suggests a relationship between the two. Whilst the nature of such a relationship remains unclear, the literature in both fields reveals potentially common themes. Body–fashion interaction lends expression to the unconscious experience of self, both internally as part of a “selfing” process, and externally by creating an identity to present to others. Conflicts within the psyche, played out on the body, contribute to a fragmented sense of self, and the view of fashion as exacerbating its disintegration may be contrasted with the belief in the power of fashion to integrate. The ambiguity of this internal confl ict is echoed by the confl icting social-psychological needs of imitation/identifi cation and differentiation that characterize the social experience of the body, and are manifested in the individual’s response to fashion. Th e apparent superfi ciality of fashion is belied by its role in giving expression to the ambivalence derived from the internal conflict of the individual, and the external ambivalence of postmodern society. Individual ambivalence focuses on the concept of the ideal body, an image created by society for the objectified body to aspire to, and a platonic ideal that encapsulates the individual sense of embodiment. Fashion’s aspirational role is to provide a means of creating an approximation to the ideal. This occurs at the body boundary, the threshold that marks the demarcation between self, as experienced within the body, and nonself as it impinges from without. The ambiguity of the body–clothing threshold fuels the fashion process, and it may be that body boundary represents an interface between the experience of self and its expression through fashion.

Joanne B. Eicher’s article Dress, the Senses, and Public, Private, and Secret Selves. focuses on the senses related to dressing the self, taking into account not only the visual aspects of dress, but the other four senses: touch, sound, scent, and taste. The article connects the senses of dress to the idea of dress for the public, private, and secret selves, providing cross-cultural examples, and concludes by relating the senses of dress to the three selves. By relating all fi ve senses to dress for the three selves, we gain a more complete picture of dress across cultures, as individuals clothe, coif, perfume, or accessorize themselves each day for diff erent settings and occasions.

Irina Sirotkina’s paper Is the body back to fashion? Corporeality during the pandemic looks at the body navigating the COVID-19 new normal reality. During the pandemic, it has become absolutely clear that the individual body belongs to the statistical, medical and in generally bureaucratic discourse, and just to the person. Nevertheless, the pandemic has demonstrated that the body remains, perhaps, the person’s most important resource. Besides influencing our “mind”, “the mental”, the body often takes place of the mental becoming the most private, intimate part the individual.

In contemporary world, the body is the mental. This process began some time ago, partly due to the so-called body-in-motion practices, including yoga, tai-chi, dance therapy, somatic movement, body-mind centering, mindfulness, etc. These and other practices lay an important claim for the unity of body and mind, the integrated character of the individual. During the pandemic, these practices were delivered to almost every home via Whats App, Skype and Zoom. “Zoom ergo sum”, occurred to yours truly after the fi rst week of isolation. It appears that the popularity of body-inmotion practices were second only to cooking, also a bodily practice. In my paper, I will argue that the quarantine conditions reinforced the discourse of the body as a substitute of “psychological”, “mental”, and even “spiritual”. We may ask whether this will help to reintroduce “the body” to the discourse of the social sciences and humanities bringing it back to fashion. 

This issue’s Culture section turns to fashion and politics and opens with Monica Titton’s essay Fashion, Feminism and Radical Protest. We are currently witnessing an uncommon politicization of fashion as an expression of protest and dissent: fashion designers are making use of the runway as a site of resistance, and design clothes that communicate defiance against a global political climate characterized by the rise of far right, authoritarian and populist political movements. This essay is an attempt to make sense of a development that infl uences contemporary fashion and to point out some of the confl icts and contradictions that arise out of the convergence of feminism, fashion and radical protest. In order to comprehend the contemporary vogue of feminist fashion and fashionable feminism respectively, and to understand the dialectic between these two phenomena, the essay recon-structs how feminism has become fashionable yet again, and which forms of feminism and feminist activism have entered the cultural and political mainstream.

Andrei Vozyanov’s Protest as Care: Belorussian Bodies Between Beauty and Danger examines the practices of the Belorussian anti-violence protests as a special form of care, closely connected with visions of beauty. The main modus of the protests, care is also the factor lending them their aesthetic aspect. Recent representations of the events as stylish, bright and sincere are in marked contrast to the stereotypical grey images of a nation frozen in the Soviet era. Besides general principles such as non-violence, diversity and creativity, the aesthetics of the protests are based on certain visual signs, fi rst and foremost, on the red and white colour combination.

A closer look at the changing appearance of the protesters from August 2020 onwards shows that beauty remained an important element even in the face of danger, suffering the same repressions as did dissent. In their every resolution of the dilemma between preparing their bodies to face danger, and focusing on the beauty of protest regardless of risk, the protesters showed care — the very care that was being denied them by their government.

Flavia Loscialpo contributes “I Am an Immigrant”: Fashion, Immigration and Borders in the Contemporary Trans-global Landscape. In the light of the Brexit vote, and the recent surge in nationalism and xenophobia in Europe, this article analyses the condition of the immigrant within fashion to pose the question: how can fashion contribute to an understanding of immigration as a constitutive aspect of contemporary society? Considering Brexit as symptomatic of wider political changes that are currently informing other Western countries, the discussion focuses on the reactions of London’s fashion world to the political scenario in Britain. “I am an immigrant” is a statement that has recently appeared in several collections and campaigns, with designers and high street brands publicly airing their pro-immigration messages.

The discussion embraces philosophical contributions on the nationstate, sovereignty, and citizenship, and applies the notion of “conviviality,” as outlined by Paul Gilroy, to discuss London’s fashion and its reactions to the anti-immigration stance of the pro-Brexit front. It then unravels the idea of national identity as a romantic construct, and analyses works, within fashion, that challenge current perceptions of immigration as well as assumptions about cultural homogeneity. By deconstructing, through fashion, the very idea of national and cultural identity, we can in fact question binary oppositions associated to the category of the immigrant, such as “citizen”/“alien,” “inside”/”outside.”

Elke Gaugele’s article The New Obscurity in Style. Alt-right Faction, Populist Normalization, and the Cultural War on Fashion from the Far Right shows how far-right politics since the millennium has increasingly made use of fashion to influence populations in Europe and North America. It therefore considers fashion as cultural material upon which collective identifications are built and further motivate political action. Its topical diagnosis on the Zeitgeist of a “new obscurity in style” embraces the political framework of the Frankfurt School in terms of shared positions and conceptions in the historical development of the New Right in Europe and North America that presently reinforce the dogma of the cultural revolution of the right. Accordingly, this critical study dissects the rise and the rhetoric of far-right fashion brands, the weaponization of AI fashion technology, as well as the infiltration by extreme-right networks of (digital) media discourses and contemporary theories on culture and fashion. From the alt-right faction to deliberately produced confusion, to downplaying the harms and normalization of a racist, white-supremacist, anti-immigration, nation-first militarist agenda, to the role of the fashion designer as a far-right activist, to the implementation of fashion profiling technologies in the extent of cyber warfare, the paper reveals the different political strategies underlying the new obscurity in style. In conclusion, it examines the concept of metapolitics as the dominant scheme behind the far right’s weaponization of fashion and fashion technologies.

In the Events column Chanelle Lalonde contributes Revisiting Resistance through Fashion at Expo 67, a review of ‘Fashioning Expo 67’ at the McCord’s Museum, Montreal, Canada (17 March — 1 October 2017).

Alison Gill offers Dress Code: Are You Playing Fashion?, a review of ‘Dress Code: Are You Playing Fashion?’ at the National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, Japan (09 August — 14 October, 2019) and at the Contemporary Art Museum, Kumamoto, Japan (December 08, 2019 — February 23, 2020).

Maria Terekhova contributes Cecil Beaton and Celebrity Cult: Ironic Admiration, a review of ‘Cecil Beaton. Celebrating Celebrity’ at the State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg, Russia (9 December 2020 — 14 March 2021).