The article introduces the concept of ‘fashion hydroscape’ as a critical framework for understanding the interdependence between fashion and planetary water systems in an age of ecological disasters. Situated in Italy’s geographically and culturally aquatic context, the article examines how water materially and symbolically shapes textile practices, imaginaries and ecological consequences. Building on Arjun Appadurai’s notion of ‘-scapes’ and Patrizia Calefato’s concept of ‘fashionscape’, the fashion hydroscape expands the focus from global cultural flows to environmental atmospheres. Here, we draw on Astrida Neimanis’s posthuman perspective on bodies as interconnected water systems. The water footprint of fashion is invisible and thus defined as virtual water. We conduct a comparative case studies analysis by intertwining two complementary dimensions. The first is the dimension of aquatic atmospheres, exemplified by three case studies: the runway shows by fashion designers Rick Owens and Carol Christian Poell, and the curatorial project In Acqua: H 2 O Molecole di Creatività . The second is a tangible dimension concerning the hidden water embedded in textile supply chains and the technologies developed to mitigate its impact. Italy’s denim sector offers particularly relevant case studies, including Gimmy Jeans’s revival of locally grown hemp, ALBINI_next’s natural indigo research and Officina39’s reduced-impact denim finishing. The concept of fashion hydroscape reveals fashion as a hydrological agent able to engage more ecocritically with ecosystems.
Review of: Fashion: New Feminist Essays , Ilya Parkins and Maryanne Dever (eds) (2024) London: Routledge, 149 pp., ISBN 978-1-03283-897-7, p/bk, GBP 35.99
Review of: Catwalk: The Art of the Fashion Show , Vitra Design Museum, Weil am Rhein, 18 October 2025–15 February 2026 1
Review of: Thinking through Fashion: A Guide to Key Theorists , 2nd ed., Agnes Rocamora and Anneke Smelik (eds) (2025) London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 336 pp., ISBN 978-1-35037-651-9, p/bk, GBP 19.99
Review of: Titanic & Fashion: The Last Dance , Kunstmuseum, The Hague, 27 September 2025–25 January 2026
Review of: Dressing à la Turque: Ottoman Influence on French Fashion, 1670–1800 , Kendra Van Cleave (2023) Kent, OH: The Kent State University Press, 256 pp., ISBN 978-1-60635-459-9, h/bk, USD 48
Review of: Queer and Trans Fashion Brands: Resistance and Revolution in the 21st Century , Kelly L. Reddy-Best (2025) London: Bloomsbury, 204 pp., ISBN 978-1-35046-587-9, p/bk, USD 34.95
Review of: Paul Poiret, La Mode Est Une Fête , Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris, 25 June 2025–11 January 2026
This editorial examines the ambivalent politics of visibility in contemporary fashion and beauty cultures. The contributions to this issue of Critical Studies in Fashion & Beauty demonstrate that visibility is never simply emancipatory. Rather, beauty operates as a deeply political terrain in which racialized and gendered identities are simultaneously expressed, commodified and regulated. Across five case studies-Asian American 'Asian Baby Girl' aesthetics YouTube, Chinese male beauty influencers on Douyin, skin bleaching practices in urban Nigeria, Afro-Italian fashion designers and sorority 'outfit of the day' performances on TikTok's RushTok-the authors explore how digital platforms and fashion markets transform embodied identities into measurable value. They show how algorithms, consumer cultures and social norms reward particular forms femininity and masculinity, often reproducing racial hierarchies, colourism and classed ideals under the guise of empowerment and choice. At the same time, issue foregrounds material practices-cosmetics, garments, craft and community labour-as crucial to understanding how identities are enacted and contested. Collectively, the articles argue that gender and race are continuously produced through aesthetic practices shaped by capitalism, technology and social judgement, rendering visibility a condition of both possibility and constraint. Delivered Intellect
Concerns over skin bleaching in Nigeria’s urban communities range from health risks to cultural and moral objections. Without discounting these issues, this article reframes skin bleaching as a form of dress or body adornment situated within a neo-liberal context that treats the body as both personal expression and a canvas of social values. Ethnographic interviews with young Nigerians reveal that participants primarily bleach to enhance beauty or remove perceived imperfections, often influenced by peer pressure, even as many acknowledge potential health dangers. However, those who bleach, especially women, face social stigma and moral judgement. I interpret these societal reactions as a form of policing, where public scrutiny transforms the personal act of skin bleaching into a spectacle and, ultimately, a commodity subject to collective evaluation. In this sense, the bleached body emerges as a contested object at the intersection of personal agency, market forces and social control. This article concludes that such societal policing both reflects and reinforces the commodification of the body in contemporary Nigeria, underscoring the tension between individual autonomy in self-fashioning and the powerful norms regulating body aesthetics.
This article investigates how male bodies in digital beauty culture in China are systematically transformed from subjects to commodified objects. I examine the construction mechanisms and alienation processes inherent in the commodification of masculine embodiment on short-form video platforms. Through a sequential mixed-methods design, I analyse 500 Douyin (TikTok China) videos from 50 male beauty content creators and conduct fifteen in-depth interviews. Content analysis reveals systematic commodification patterns, with 66 per cent of videos containing explicit commercial promotion and creators employing feminine linguistic markers achieving significantly higher engagement rates. Interview analysis identifies three primary alienation dimensions: identity fragmentation, content homogenization and inverse relationships between commercial success and creative satisfaction. Platform algorithms create disciplinary mechanisms that constrain authentic gender expression while appearing to democratize aesthetic representation. While male beauty content in China appears to challenge traditional gender boundaries, it ultimately reinforces capitalist commodity relations by generating systematic alienation, with particular implications for adolescent audiences who constitute primary consumers of this content. The strategic deployment of ‘hybrid masculinities’ demonstrates how apparent gender transgression serves to expand rather than eliminate patriarchal structures within digital consumer environments. My findings reveal that contemporary consumer culture’s promise of empowerment through consumption remains fundamentally illusory, extending patterns of commodification previously associated with female subjects to encompass masculine embodiment within algorithmic media systems.
Asian Baby Girl (ABG) represents a prominent second-generation Asian American archetype rooted in the 1980s and 1990s, where youth navigated sociopolitical constraints by creating a distinct culture that challenged historical legacies of exclusion and the ‘forever foreign’ portrayal of Asians. Their particular aesthetic has gained prominence among Asian American beauty creators on YouTube within the past five years, particularly through ABG transformation videos. This article examines how these videos construct and commodify Asian femininity within this digital space, shaped by YouTube’s attention economy. While ABG transformation videos contribute to a uniquely Asian American cultural space in digital media, they also homogenize Asian femininity, reinforcing an East Asian-dominant, hypersexualized and decontextualized visuality. The commodification of ABG on YouTube particularly relies on marketable archetypes of Asian femininity, exacerbating intra-ethnic othering among Asian Americans. By analysing how digitally performed ABG becomes ahistorical, visually appealing and easily consumable, this article highlights the shifting dynamics of Asian American cultural representation and the self-commodification of Asian American identity in digital media.
Sororities are social organizations for women at North American universities with codified standards of dress. RushTok, a portmanteau of sorority 'rush', or recruitment, and TikTok, refers to a digital sociality on TikTok, where users share videos related to sorority life. It is best known for 'outfit of the day' (OOTD) videos, which are typically created by potential new sorority members to share their outfits for each day of sorority recruitment. Using feminist new materialist theory, I conducted two rounds of intraviews with thirteen RushTok users to explore their experiences on RushTok and their perception of influence and influencers in this space. I analyse the interviews by thinking with the theory of intra-action to map the material-discursive formations that generate influence and make the boundaries of the influencer subjectivity visible on RushTok. My analysis suggests that the OOTD format, style-fashion-dress, communication practices and narrative framing are significant agents or apparatuses in the production of RushTok creators as fashion influencers. As these apparatuses enfold algorithmic, cultural and spatial logics, I consider how they may materialize differently into becoming or not becoming fashion influencers. This process-oriented approach positions fashion influence(rs) as a localized arrangement of bodies, objects and expressions that is not fixed or static but rather always becoming.
The traditional paradigms of fashion are facing an ongoing process of redefinition driven by the emergence of new markets and new imaginaries. Migration and diasporic movements play a role in this transformation. The case of ‘Made in Italy’ is particularly emblematic in light of the growing contribution of Afro-descendant designers to the Italian fashion scene. Within this context, we observe new cultural intermediaries as well as less visible, smaller-scale activities operating at the local and community level. These dynamics contribute to the transformation and diversification of the Italian fashion system across its latent and explicit dimensions, from everyday informal practices to more formalized and institutionalized ones. Drawing on in-depth interviews with Afro-descendant designers and key informants, ethnographic notes and secondary sources, in this article we employ concepts from the interdisciplinary field of practice theory to examine how Afro-descendant designers navigate and influence new forms of economic, social and cultural capital. Drawing from the interconnected dimensions of competence, meanings and materials as developed by sociologists of practice, we demonstrate how Afro-descendant Italian designers integrate new cultural elements into the Italian fashion industry, mediating between inherited traditions, local craftsmanship and the aesthetic and symbolic legacies of their cultural backgrounds.
This article explores gender bias in NIVEA (R) sunscreen advertisements through a transhistorical lens, using multimodal critical discourse analysis to interrogate their linguistic and semiotic features and how these shape discourses around health and beauty. Comparing historical advertisements (1931-61) in the Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet with contemporary advertisements (2015-23) on NIVEA (R)'s Swedish Instagram and website, it identifies three core themes: Sexualization and Beauty; Scientific Rationality; and Shifting Functions, Formulations and Usages. The analysis reveals that sunscreen marketing has long been tied to feminine beauty, with advertisements employing pseudoscientific claims to encourage women to protect their skin and avoid premature ageing. Both past and present advertisements emphasize personal and collective responsibility, reinforcing neo-liberal ideals of bodily self-management. Although contemporary advertisements portray women as slightly more empowered, they still uphold idealized standards of feminine beauty, positioning sunscreen as an essential everyday product for maintaining youth. This study advocates for marketing strategies that frame sunscreen as a universal health necessity, with diverse representations and practical use cases, and calls for stricter regulations to address misleading visual and semiotic elements in advertising.
In this introductory article, we draw on border metaphors to explore the ways in which the authors in this issue highlight fashion and beauty systems' roles in overlapping and overcoming, as well as sustaining existing hegemonic constructions of identity: gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, nation and globalization. We contend that fashion and beauty systems socially construct, reconstruct, blur, mix and diminish borders, but their elimination may still unfortunately be aspirational, even in the context of global and neo-liberal capitalism.
Volodymyr Zelensky became president of Ukraine in a landslide election in April 2019. Widely acclaimed for his unusual election strategy and populist rhetoric, Zelensky rebranded himself to disassociate from being a comedian and a trickster politician. Using Zelensky’s self-fashioning, I examine several strategies in his fashion choices to convey messages about gender and masculinity. His clothing, body language and behaviour tell a story about an uneasy relationship in Ukraine between the competing narratives of the nation and its military history and present. I argue that Zelensky’s clothing signals a sharp turn away from his previous pre- and post-election rhetoric of civic secularism and peaceful nationalism, as well as his emphasis on belonging. His use of military fatigues and traditional Ukrainian clothing demonstrates that he adapted his message to underscore Ukraine’s culture and history, while also drawing attention to the country’s militarization. At the same time, the casual style of dress he adopted, his open emotional expressions and his body language show a more contemporary and non-hegemonic version of masculinity.
Jorg Colberg’s analysis of ‘neo-liberal realism’ includes images of celebrities, landscapes and portraiture but does not extend to examining the role of fashion photography in neo-liberal contexts. I propose a definition for the neo-liberal fashion image, drawing on Botz-Bornstein’s theory of deculturation, which identifies a flattening and decontextualization of political motifs in the service of the neo-liberal paradigm. This is particularly evident in contemporary fashion images describing themselves as political through their titles, associated keywords, settings and styling, that nonetheless visualize a reductive and aestheticized representation of global politics. A 2014 fashion editorial set in the United Nations headquarters serves as my case study. I propose three characteristics of the neo-liberal fashion image: decultured excellence, banality and the displacement of the visceral and violent. These photographs prioritize stylistic qualities in the representation of complex political ideas and cultural realities, eliminating nuances and conflict, and constructing a bureaucratic and simplified interpretation. The proliferation of these images in post-millennial fashion media contributes to existing narratives of security, seamless supranational integration and the glorification of the neo-liberal world order.
Black women in Harlem, New York City, challenge and disrupt conventional archival practices by collecting, wearing and documenting dress through their own voices, bodies and materials. This research uses a case study of Harlem-based multimedia artist Dianne Smith and her archival repository at Barnard College to introduce a new theoretical concept: collective-declaration. This concept captures how Black women assert individual agency while simultaneously forming a collective resistance to oppressive structures, claiming their rightful place in the past, present and future as place-makers through fashion archiving. We focus on Smith’s archive as a central example, particularly in its connection to the life and legacy of Zora Neale Hurston – Harlem Renaissance writer, thinker and anthropologist – whose influence shaped the archive’s development. By defining and curating her own archive, Smith both affirms her historical legacy and contests the erasure and exclusion of Black womanhood from conventional university archives. Through the practice of collective-declaration, Smith reimagines and transforms the traditional archive into a new place, rooted in spatial presence and the dressed Black body, offering a powerful intervention into dominant archival frameworks.
