This study sought to explore how emotionally durable design and quick-response (QR) technology can be applied in a prototype garment to create durable emotional bonds between consumer and product while addressing consumers’ demand for transparency in the apparel industry through an essential link to product information. The garment’s distinctive design, which includes a laser-cut memorial element on the back, enhances its uniqueness and visual and emotional impact, strengthening its emotional durability. The design’s overall aesthetic integrates a QR code in the form of a laser-etched leather square, which plays a dual role. First, it helps achieve emotional durability by allowing consumers to scan the code and learn about the garment makers, their stories and the processes involved in garment development, strengthening emotional involvement. Second, the QR code allows consumers to access helpful information such as product care, repair and recycling options, as well as valuable information about product sustainability and traceability and the company’s corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives, which consumers increasingly seek and consider in their apparel purchase decisions. Emotional involvement and CSR awareness are shown to encourage more sustainable consumption practices and circularity in the apparel industry.
Review of: In American Fashion: Ruth Finley’s Fashion Calendar , Natalie Nudell (2024) London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 214 pp., ISBN 978-1-35038-583-2, h/bk, USD 115.00
This editorial introduces the Special Issue ‘Products as Fashion’ and suggests that many product decisions are shaped by both functional requirements and fashion evaluation. Across the six contributions, the issue treats ‘fashion’ as the ways products are assessed, circulated and interpreted in everyday life, and it emphasizes researchable processes that connect production and market positioning, branding and heritage narratives and context-driven decision-making. The collection further shows how embodied constraints such as fit, interactive structures that shape use, and community norms influence what is recognized as acceptable or desirable in different settings. By bringing together historical and contemporary cases across diverse objects and practices, the Special Issue develops a shared lens for fashion studies and product design research and points to future comparative work across categories and regions.
This article explores glam rock fashion of the 1970s as a transformative force in the expression and visibility of queer identities within urban media landscapes. Glam rock emerged during a period of cultural upheaval and experimentation. Glam rock operated not only as a musical genre but also as a visual and performative phenomenon that redefined the aesthetics of gender and sexuality. Through the flamboyant, androgynous costumes, stylized personas and theatrical stagecraft of artists such as David Bowie, Marc Bolan and Roxy Music, glam rock destabilized dominant heteronormative conventions and offered a radical reimagining of identity and self-presentation. These artists cultivated personas that blurred the boundaries between masculine and feminine, real and performative, thereby offering new modes of queer expression and identification. This article situates glam rock within broader frameworks of fashion theory, queer studies and media analysis to argue that its fashion was far more than a surface-level style; it was a political and cultural intervention. The aesthetics of glam rock functioned as a medium through which artists and audiences could perform resistance, articulate fluid identities and claim space in mainstream media environments often hostile to queer visibility. In doing so, glam rock contributed to a growing repertoire of queer cultural strategies, helping to legitimize and amplify non-normative gender expressions in public discourse. By closely analysing iconic media appearances, album artwork, fashion editorials and televised performances, this study highlights how glam rock’s visual culture redefined the relationship between fashion and identity. It also traces glam rock’s enduring legacy in shaping contemporary queer aesthetics seen today in gender-fluid fashion collections and performative social media personas. At its core, this article contends that glam rock fashion was not only pivotal in its own era, but it also remains a foundational influence on the evolution of queer style, performance and media representation in the twenty-first century.
This article interrogates the prevailing narrative that artificial intelligence (AI) and circular economy practices represent genuine strategic transformation in fashion retail. While the Dynamic Capabilities View (DCV) defines adaptability as a firm’s capacity to sense, seize and transform in response to environmental change, we argue that these processes, when enacted through AI applications and sustainability initiatives, often operate as symbolic simulations rather than drivers of substantive change. By bridging DCV with insights from economic sociology and poststructuralist theory, this study contends that the appearance of adaptability is frequently shaped by field-contingent legitimacy performances, rather than by organizational learning or competitive advantage. Drawing on Bourdieu’s theory of capital and field, the sociology of conventions and Baudrillard’s notion of simulacra, we examine how AI-enabled personalization, sustainability dashboards and circular economy rhetoric serve to aestheticize responsibility and innovate perception, rather than transform underlying systems. This article maps the production of symbolic ‘capabilities’ in contemporary fashion contexts, challenging dominant accounts of tech-led sustainability and contributing to a reconceptualization of what it means for fashion firms to adapt in the era of platform capitalism and environmental volatility.
Review of: The In Crowd: Mod Fashion and Style 1958–1966 , Brighton Museum & Art Gallery, Brighton, 10 May 2025–4 January 2026
Review of: Fashion in American Life , Hazel Clark and Lauren Downing Peters (eds) (2024) London, Oxford, New York, New Delhi and Sydney: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 279 pp., ISBN 978-3-50331-938, h/bk, USD 90.00 ISBN 978-3-50331-921, p/bk, USD 31.45 ISBN 978-3-50331-945, e-PDF, USD 25.16 ISBN 978-3-50331-952, e-book, USD 25.16
This interview with Dr Yuniya Kawamura, professor of sociology at the Fashion Institute of Technology, explores her foundational contributions to the development of fashion sociology and her conceptualization of fashion as a global institutional system. Conducted in July 2025, the exchange traces Kawamura’s intellectual formation, from her transnational upbringing and professional background in design to her doctoral research on Japanese designers in the French fashion system and its influences on her theoretical framework. Her major works, including The Japanese Revolution in Paris Fashion (2004), Fashion-ology (2005; 3rd ed., 2023), Doing Research in Fashion and Dress (2011; 2nd ed., 2020), Fashioning Japanese Subcultures (2012; 2nd ed., 2025), Sneakers (2016) and Cultural Appropriation in Fashion and Entertainment (2022), have refined the field’s methodological and epistemological scope. Throughout the interview, Kawamura reflects on the sociological legitimacy of fashion, the global circulation of style and the challenges of decentering Eurocentric paradigms. Her reflections underscore the importance of interdisciplinarity and empirical rigour, particularly within East Asian fashion studies. By situating Kawamura’s career within broader debates on cultural exchange and institutional power, this article highlights how her work has transformed fashion studies into a dynamic, globally engaged discipline. It also calls attention to the ongoing need for inclusive, contextually grounded scholarship that recognizes fashion as both a system of representation and a site of transnational connection.
This article examines how generative artificial intelligence (AI) design platforms are reshaping fashion and textile design by mediating creative processes, reconfiguring design roles and influencing aesthetic outcomes. While these design practices have traditionally relied on embodied techniques such as sketching or draping, AI platforms shift the creative process towards prompt-writing, thus transforming the designer’s role into one of linguistic precision. These systems not only facilitate design but also condition imaginaries, authorship and aesthetic norms. Drawing on an AI-augmented walkthrough methodology, we analyse four platforms through two themes: what we term the ‘limits of democratization’ and the ‘myth of the muse’. We show how platforms position themselves as accessible and inspirational while at the same time depending on opaque infrastructures, embedding aesthetic biases and upholding technical gatekeeping. Claims to democratization often obscure the need for professional knowledge and prompt fluency and overlook how defaults marginalize certain bodies, identities and styles. At the same time, the framing of AI as a muse conceals the constrained, algorithmically structured nature of digital creativity. Drawing on theories of ‘cultural infrastructure’, ‘distributed agency’ and ‘market agencements’, we examine how interface design, algorithmic suggestions and user scripts configure what can be created, who is positioned as a designer, and how creative practice is recognized and valued within fashion design culture. These dynamics show that AI design platforms do not simply mediate creativity; they reconfigure design practices and redistribute creative agency. Rather than serving as neutral tools, they function as socio-technical systems embedded in cultural and commercial infrastructures. By offering a critical, design-led perspective, this article contributes to understanding how generative AI reshapes the conditions under which fashion is imagined, produced and valued, thereby advancing emerging debates on AI and creativity in fashion.
Using the ‘visible invisibility’ of Katherine Schweighofer and the concept of being ‘functionally invisible’ from Mary L. Gray, this article examines the musical stylings and clothing choices of Lil Nas X and Chappell Roan. In Nas’s ‘Old Town Road’ era and Chappell’s ‘Midwest Princess’ tour, both artists create a kind of functionally invisible queerness to outsiders. They use regional fashion choices and a complex layering of lyrics to fit into mainstream country and pop, respectively, musical and visual expectations. While this adherence to expectations may provide an entry point into their music for some fans, a closer inspection reveals the truly queer nature of both artists.
The National Retail Federation (NRF) is an internationally renowned trade organization based in Washington DC that represents the business interests of retailers and industry-related companies. The organization advocates on behalf of its retail members, conducts industry and consumer research, markets forecasts and convenes its members for networking and information sharing. One of the important aspects of the NRF’s role is a once-a-year conference called Retail’s Big Show. Alongside Retail’s Big Show is the annual Expo, a showcase of new and emerging technologies that give a glimpse into the future of retail tech. This article is a review of the conference and its significance to the industry by keeping retailers abreast of critical innovations that enhance how they stay resilient, efficient and connected to the consumer. It contributes perspectives on the conference through a series of interviews and recent web highlights from key business sources.
Haute couture is regarded as the epitome of high fashion – an exquisite combination of a designer’s vision, techniques of rarefied artisanal construction and an unaffordable luxury for most. The figure of the clown, in contrast, is regarded by some scholars and audiences as belonging to the realm of the ‘clod-like’, as a humorous figure that appeals to humanity’s desire for low if not base comedy. Yet haute couture and the practice of clowning have much in common – individuality in dress, exquisite craftsmanship and the desire to provide spectacular and speculative experiences for their respective audiences. Both fashion and clowning have a particular affinity to avant-garde artistic practices. Could popular culture theory contemplate the intersection of haute couture and techniques of clowning in producing a new and distinct species of darkly humorous performance and high fashion? A theoretical examination of the glamour of haute couture and clowning is provided to demonstrate the similarities between these iconic cultural popular culture phenomena. Within comics and cinema figures such as the Joker and Harley Quinn feature prominently as exemplars of both fashion and clowning. Musician and actor Lady Gaga provides a unique example of a contemporary artist who may act as a model for the ‘glam clown’ as a distinct figure for both clowning and fashion.
This article presents a critical analysis of the systemic crisis facing the global luxury industry. It argues that the sector’s decades-long pursuit of financialization and neocolonial globalization has precipitated a fundamental identity crisis, hollowing out the core tenets of craftsmanship, exclusivity and cultural integrity that traditionally defined luxury. Through a detailed audit against J. N. Kapferer’s luxury strategy framework, the article quantifies the industry’s divergence from its own first principles. It then examines the primary drivers of this decay: the offshoring and consequent death of craftsmanship; the epidemic of logo-mania and creative bankruptcy; the short-termist pressures of financial markets; the unsustainable reliance on celebrity influence; the erosion of price integrity through discounting and the performative nature of sustainability initiatives. Crucially, the analysis contrasts this decline with the concurrent rise of culturally autonomous luxury brands in Asia and Africa, whose success is predicated on the very principles western conglomerates have abandoned. The article concludes that the industry’s survival is contingent upon a radical reinvention. It proposes a detailed manifesto for cultural reclamation, advocating for a new luxury paradigm where value is measured in artisanal capital, equitable cultural exchange and creative sovereignty, thereby ensuring resilience and relevance in an increasingly sceptical and multipolar world.
In July 2025, the clothing brand American Eagle Outfitters (AEO) unveiled their latest denim jeans campaign featuring actress Sydney Sweeney. The campaign has received backlash for its not-so-subtle pun signalling Sweeney’s blond-haired and blue-eyed Whiteness as ‘good jeans’. The online criticism, however, was met with conservative support as several White House officials celebrated and defended the campaign. This article argues that the campaign’s combination of denim, Whiteness and all-American iconicity in juxtaposition to Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter aesthetic and her own Levi Strauss & Co. jeans campaign explicates what kind of woman dominant US culture deems can embody American patriotism within the current sociopolitical moment. By contextualizing these campaigns in the history of denim blue jeans, this article explores how jeans represent more than just a consumer good, but act as a symbol and articulator of cultural ideology and national belonging. In so doing, Beyoncé’s blue jean cowboy aesthetic and Levi Strauss & Co. campaign can be understood as a disruption to the ‘right’ kind of female performance of American patriotism. The conservative response to both advertisements illustrates the affective and electoral politics of denim blue jeans, underscoring contemporary stakes of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ embodiments of race, gender and sexuality.
Virgil Abloh was a contemporary creative phenomenon who disrupted conventional elite fashion structures (high culture) by using ‘streetwear’ (low culture) to expand Black cultural legitimacy. Importantly, Abloh’s work can be understood as decolonizing and supporting the social justice efforts of the early twenty-first century, as seen with American/global social movements LGBTQIA+, #MeToo and Black Lives Matter. The aim of this article is to investigate hip-hop and Blackness using fashion as a vehicle for debate to expand concepts of aesthetics (subjective and objective perception), quality/taste (judgement) and hierarchy (power). This article coins the ‘Virgil Abloh Effect’ theory – defined as a method or practice that describes how Abloh was able to achieve the destabilization of the luxury system, whereby he engaged the use of transmedia communication and transcreative practice to establish new mainstream aesthetic and cultural norms at the nexus of fashion, art and music.
Despite ongoing calls for diversity in fashion, Indigenous women remain underrepresented as fashion trendsetters. This study examines how Andean Indigenous celebrities in Bolivia shape the fashion consumption practices of urban Indigenous women, offering an alternative framework for understanding style, and ethnic identity through fashion consumption. Drawing on self-congruity theory, the research examines how these figures align with consumers’ real and ideal self-concepts through the cultural meanings they convey to their attires. Using the Balance Worth methodology, a quantitative analysis is conducted to examine how Indigenous celebrities influence the dress styles of 400 urban Indigenous women. Findings reveal that the most influential icons belong to the so-called chola bourgeoisie , an urban Indigenous elite. These trendsetters symbolize prestige, economic prosperity and strong ties to folkloric traditions – traits that reflect consumers’ aspirational identities. The results suggest that Indigenous women are actively redefining beauty ideals by embracing role models rooted in their own cultural and social context. This preference constitutes a form of symbolic resistance, positioning fashion as a tool for empowerment, identity affirmation and the legitimation of an emerging Indigenous elite. This research contributes to fashion and ethnic studies by foregrounding the role of Indigenous consumers in redefining cultural legitimacy and decolonizing self-perception through fashion.
For those who know me well, they can usually smell me coming. I love fragrance and have always considered this a part of my overall style. I really enjoy Chanel’s Les Exclusifs and Dior’s Privée Collection as part of my getting-dressed routine. That is why, when my colleague June He, assistant professor in product design, asked me if I would consider a Special Issue on ‘Products as Fashion’, it was a definite yes!
In contemporary American politics, representation by the underrepresented has become both a marker of progress and a site of contention, particularly when intersecting with race and gender. This study critically examines Kamala Harris as a political object through which broader societal tensions surrounding power, identity and legitimacy manifest. Drawing from Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) and critical political communication, the article interrogates how Harris’s political trajectory reflects the structural biases that continue to shape perceptions of leadership and authority. As the first female, Black and South Asian Democrat Presidential candidate, Harris occupies a paradoxical position – her historic election to the office of the Vice President initially signified progress, yet the racialized and gendered scrutiny she faced during the 2024 presidential election campaigns illustrates the enduring barriers to true political equity. Through an analysis of media discourse and historical case studies, this study reveals how Harris’s struggles on the fronts of colour and gender disrupt, yet simultaneously reinforce, dominant power structures. Her presidential pursuit highlights the limitations of symbolic representation, exposing how race and gender continue to dictate the terms of political legitimacy. By situating Harris within the broader struggles of marginalized politicians, this study advances critical discussions on political representation, structural inequities and the ongoing tensions between diversity and power in American democracy.
The COVID-19 pandemic precipitated unprecedented transformations in global dressing practices, reconfiguring the cultural, political and economic frameworks within which clothing operates. This Special Issue of Fashion, Style & Popular Culture interrogates the sartorial shifts that emerged during the pandemic and their enduring legacies. Bringing together twelve research articles, a visual essay and an interview, 'Dressing through Pandemics' examines how dress functioned simultaneously as protective technology, sociopolitical symbol, ethical statement and site of creative adaptation. Central to these dynamics was the face mask, which evolved from clinical personal protective equipment to contested emblem of care, compliance or defiance and into an object of aesthetic innovation and branding. The Special Issue contributors adopt diverse disciplinary perspectives including fashion theory, psychology, cultural studies, material culture and consumer behaviour to analyse pandemic dressing across diverse geographies and contexts. Case studies explore the politicization and aestheticization of masks in North America, Europe and Africa; the psychological and emotional dimensions of pandemic self-presentation; and the acceleration of DIY and craft-based fashion practices. Further contributions address shifts in retail landscapes, digital consumption and sustain-ability discourses, revealing how pandemic conditions reshaped consumer values and expectations of authenticity. By situating clothing within the broader material and symbolic economies of pandemic life, this collection demonstrates that dress was not a peripheral concern but a central medium through which individuals and communities navigated crisis, expressed identity and imagined futures. Five years on, the legacies of pandemic dressing remain visible in heightened sensitivity to protective dress, increased integration of digital retail and a recalibration of fashion's relationship to care, resilience and social belonging. 'Dressing through Pandemics' affirms the critical importance of clothing as both an embodied practice and a cultural artefact in times of global disruption.
The COVID-19 pandemic has changed many aspects of our lives, including our perception of fashion and dressing styles. This study aims to analyse the long-term impacts of the pandemic on Italian consumers’ fashion preferences, attitudes and behaviours as perceived by industry professionals. Using a qualitative methodology, the author conducted fifteen in-depth interviews with professionals from diverse fields (manufacturing, retail, marketing, communication, styling, design, etc.). Data was analysed through thematic analysis to identify recurring themes and insights, with additional secondary data from recent reports on Italian consumption. This article contributes to the current literature in two main areas. Firstly, the interviews with fashion professionals show how COVID-19 led Italian consumers to prioritize comfort and practicality in their clothing choices – an approach adopted during the pandemic but sustained afterwards. This shift is notable for Italians, who traditionally favour elegance or at least formality in daily attire. Importantly, this shift does not indicate a loss of enjoyment in dressing well; rather, consumers are now balancing this pleasure with the comfort of more relaxed styles. Secondly, the article highlights how COVID-19 raised awareness about sustainability, with Italians primarily focusing on environmental sustainability. This awareness is evident in behaviours like a preference for long-lasting, timeless garments and the rise of second-hand fashion, especially among Generation Z (Gen Z). However, this consumer remains a key demographic for ultra-low-price retailers, presenting a contradiction that may lessen over time. This study hypothesizes that young consumers, now entering the workforce, currently lack the purchasing power to afford fully sustainable wardrobes.
