Fashion Tales: Feeding the Imaginary

The emerging sub-discipline of fashion anthropology is far from established despite its significant potential to contribute to rectifying some of the most obstinate misunderstandings in current fashion scholarship as a result of ethno- and euro- centric academic practice. One important potential, for example, lays in its ability to contest some prevailing false assumptions concerning both traditional and fashionable dress associated respectively with the non-West and West. It not only disputes misassumptions concerning so-called traditional dress as being merely static, authentic and symbolic rather than aesthetic, but also concerning fashion as being purely dynamic, innovative, aesthetic rather than symbolic, cosmopolitan and, most importantly, detached from its cultural heritage. This false dichotomy is predominantly the result of a disciplinary divide between the anthropology of dress and fashion studies, which has led to obsolete interpretations of key concepts like tradition, modernity, local, global, western and non-western. By combining the core principles and research techniques of anthropology with the key scholarship of fashion studies, fashion anthropology has the potential to rectify the misconception that fashion is a European/western invention and phenomenon. By emphasizing a true global perspective through cross-cultural comparisons based on extensive field research, it can contribute significantly to a new, all-inclusive, definition of fashion that acknowledges a wide scope of fashion systems across the globe. Contrary to fashion studies, which are based on European costume history, fashion anthropology has a central role to play in rectifying the misunderstanding that fashion was solemnly introduced in the so-called non-West by European encounter, denying local fashion histories altogether. On the contrary, fashion anthropology focuses on fashion as highly linked to context-specific cultural, historical, economic, political and religious developments in all parts of the world rather than a mere cultural appropriation from the West through recent processes of globalization. Because fashion anthropology is a developing sub-discipline, little is know about it and therefore the principal aim of this paper is to identify the core aspects of fashion anthropology, its principal methodology as well as the high potentials it entails for both dress and fashion studies.

2021

In accordance with Gilles Lipovetsky (2002), this paper explores fashion, its current form and functions, as a consequence of the development of the modern Western world. Although the author points out different possibilities for the discursive reading of fashion in the cultural space, emphasis is put on the discourse led by the rise of an individualized subject, which is a symptom of modern democratic societies. Within this frame, fashion is a proof of individualistic tendencies and autonomous subjectivity, which enable it to function as an important tool of self-expression for both the individual and diverse social communities. In this context, fashion clothes – functioning as a costume – claim authenticity as well as other qualities that strengthen the differentiating possibilities as well as capabilities on the axis me/us, he/you, own/ other. Moreover, the language of fashion has been influenced by globalization in recent decades, which encourages the emergence of culturally lay...

ZoneModa Journal, 2022

‘Fashion Matters’ is a fascinating concept to think about the relevance of fashion and, at the same time, the vibrant substance which fashion is made of. This concept was the title of the lecture series delivered by Anneke Smelik, professor of Visual Culture at the Radboud University Nijmegen (Netherlands) whom I invited as visiting researcher and professor IR.IDE at Università Iuav di Venezia, Department of Architecture and Arts in Spring 2022.1 The series explored the new paradigms of fashion cultures by connecting the interrelated issues of climate change, technology, and identity. Articulated in five encounters, it covered the topics of Fashion and Sustainability: setting the stage (2nd March); Anthropocene: Posthumanism and New Materialism (9th March); Posthuman Bodies and Identities (16th March); Wearable Technology and Bio-couture (23rd March); and A Posthuman Ethics of Care for Fashion (30th March).

Fashion meanings are constantly shifting as they interact with specific sociohistorical, economic and cultural situations, and its specific manifestations in Asia deserves further scholarly exploration. This ethno-graphic research explains how today's fashion media represent fashion in synchrony with the cycles of ever-changing Western and global fashion. I take readers on a journey of remapping the conflicting notions of fashion. In the course of participant observation at a Chinese fashion magazine and interviews with over thirty fashion industry personnel in Hong Kong and mainland China, four myths of fashion are discerned on the personal, organisational, industry and national levels. Sequentially, each level correspond to each myth, and each myth involves two specific pairs of conflicting or even paradoxical imaginaries of fashion. They become the readers' critical spectacles to look through the constraining and enabling nature of fashion in a real social setting in the Asian context. Since the early twentieth century, communications technology has been abruptly and rapidly developing. The mass media that disseminates and receives information has already evolved through several generations in the past century, with telegrams giving way to the telephone, radio, cinema, television and now the global internet, and it is still changing quickly. In disseminating messages, various media influence the direction, speed and process of political, economic, academic and cultural developments in a complex way. Today, diverse online and offline media supply an endless flow of messages daily. Among them are fashion messages. More and more images and text linked with the idea of fashion are being received and seen. Fashion marketers create and recycle a vast array of cultural signs and spectacles in their advertising and branding, using videos, promotional materials, spatial designs and even architecture. They attempt to connect and even fuse fashion with art, culture and also history, permeating society. Abstract and ambiguous meanings are often encoded in the text and visuals of fashion communications, often making them difficult to analyse and interpret systematically. Beyond that, in today's globalised world, people on every continent are to some extent impacted by such fashion communications. The meanings they comprehend may be very different, and they certainly are not static. Meanings are constantly shifting as they interact with the specific social, historical, economic and cultural situations. The significance of these transformations deserves further scholarly exploration applying media,

ZoneModa, 2022

‘Fashion Matters’ is a fascinating concept to think about the relevance of fashion and, at the same time, the vibrant substance which fashion is made of. This concept was the title of the lecture series delivered by Anneke Smelik, professor of Visual Culture at the Radboud University Nijmegen (Netherlands), who was invited as visiting researcher and professor at Università Iuav di Venezia, Department of Architecture and Arts in Spring 2022.1 The series explored the new paradigms of fashion cultures by connecting the interrelated issues of climate change, technology, and identity. Articulated in five encounters, it covered the topics of Fashion and Sustainability: setting the stage; Anthropocene: Posthumanism and New Materialism; Posthuman Bodies and Identities; Wearable Technology and Bio-couture; and A Posthuman Ethics of Care for Fashion. Prof. Alessandra Vaccari wrote a report of this lecture series.

Clothing Cultures (6.1), 2020

Editorial foreword to the FCVC Network Special Issue of Clothing Cultures (6.1, Intellect). Guest edited by Sarah Gilligan. Featuring articles by international established, early career and emerging scholars and practitioners. Baker, Claire A. 'An experiential investigation into the embroidery practices of the Chernobyl Babushka'. pp. 17-34(18) Kleiman, Anna 'Dress to oppress: Performing blasphemy on the red carpet' pp. 35-55(21) Ulusoy, Nilay 'It’s hard to do fashion in Istanbul ‐ or is it?' pp. 57-75(19) Venohr, Dagmar 'fake_fashion_agency: Aesthetical making and vestimentary tactics between geniuses, creativity and Shanzhai' pp. 77-96(20) Gerrie, Vanessa 'The Diet Prada effect: ‘Call-out culture’ in the contemporary fashionscape' pp. 97-113(17) Thomadaki, Theodora '‘Getting Naked with Gok Wan’: A psychoanalytic reading of How To Look Good Naked’s transformational narratives' pp. 115-134(20) https://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/intellect/cc/2019/00000006/00000001

2013

What do Marlies Dekkers’ lingerie and contemporary flagship stores have in common? What links American Apparel’s campaign to reform the U.S. immigration law and an ancient doll called Pandora? In a few words, the answer is: fashion. Fashion as an emblematic field to understand the contemporary social world. Fashion as a ‘cultural industry’ where the pole of production and that of consumption meet each other: on the one side, every process of ideation, designing and manufacturing carried out by professionals working in the fashion companies, and on the other, the complex and heterogeneous group of social actors who face the apparel proposals by buying (or not buying) clothes and - in so doing - putting them into their everyday lives as generators of meanings. The book aims to explore fashion as a meeting point between producers and consumers as well as processes and people whose work connects the two dimensions, making the materiality of clothes a doorway to join the immaterial horizons of fashion. Table of Contents The Crossroad between Production and Consumption: An Introduction to Fashion as a Cultural Industry Marco Pedroni - FREE DOWNLOAD Part 1: Designing and Producing Fashion The Knock-On from the Knock-Off: Recent Shifts within Australian Mass Market Fashion Design Practice Alice Payne ‘Everyone Deserves to Dress Well’: Democratization of Fashion in Turkey and the Case of LC Waikiki Ayşe Nil Kireçci The Invisible Presence of the Internalised Corset: Post-Feminist Values Materialised in Marlies Dekkers’ Lingerie Daniëlle Bruggeman Part 2: Communicating Fashion Meta-Modernism in Fashion and Style Practice: Authorship and the Consumer Julianne Pederson Pandora in the Box: Travelling around the World in the Name of Fashion Lydia Maria Taylor What is Special in the Collections? Fashion Brands and Semiotic Saturation Emanuela Mora Part 3: Consuming Fashion The Evolution of the Retail Space from Luxury Malls to Guerrilla Stores: Tracing the Change of Fashion Cecilia Winterhalter Sellers of Experience: The New Face of Fashion Retail and the Role of Consumers as ‘Store Readers’ Marco Pedroni An Exploratory Study into the Strategic Significance of Visual Merchandising: The Case of Vintage Fashion Retailing Karinna Nobbs, Julie McColl and Linda Shearer The Political Power of the Online Shop: American Apparel’s Virtual Campaign for Immigration Reform Emma C. McClendon

Critical Studies in fashion and beauty, 2010

While critical views inherited from the past still influence our appraisal of fashion, its pervasiveness in contemporary society calls for an explanation. In this article I attempt to show how the importance of fashion in our society is the result of a combination of a structurally modern space and Romantic cultural ideals. I conclude that, despite its frivolous appearance, fashion is not only a powerful social indicator, but also a particular means of bringing together the diverse and often contradictory demands of our human nature through a peculiar exercise of practical judgment.