Review of: Thinking Through Fashion: A Guide to Key Theorists, 2nd ed. , Agnès Rocamora and Anneke Smelik (eds) (2025) London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 336 pp., ISBN 978-1-35037-651-9, p/bk, USD 26.95
Review of: Dai fashion blog all’attivismo: Un’introduzione critica alla influence culture , Marco Pedroni (2025) Rome: Carocci, 204 pp., ISBN 978-8-82903-204-4, p/bk, EUR 22.00
Over the past twenty years, there has been a growing interest in kimono wearing with new kimono producers and retailers developing innovative approaches to kimono making and promotion processes. This article draws on content and narrative analysis from the frameworks of cultural entrepreneurship and sensemaking/ sensegiving to analyse the activities of three 'culturepreneurs' at the forefront of the revitalization of kimono today: HOSOO, Ginza Motoji and TOMIHIRO. The article argues that these 'culturepreneurs' employ five major narratives: identity, making, innovation/tradition, education and community to provide new interpretations of kimono through processes of bricolage that are rooted in their respective company history and identity. In reinterpreting and re-evaluating kimono, these culturepreneurs balance innovative approaches against the essence of traditions, cultural practices and processes of making that are embedded within local and global fashion knowledge and practice, notably, doing so without disrupting the kimono fashion system itself. These stories work as acts of 'translation' that help convince their audience of the legitimacy of their new approaches, conveying
100 Fashion and Textile Terms in Khmer, English and French is a trilingual glossary designed to respond to linguistic and cultural gaps in scholarship on Cambodian fashion and textiles. Created by Magali An Berthon in 2025, with illustrations by Cambodian artist Sao Sreymao, it currently exists both as a digital database and an e-book. This open-access online resource is devised as a work-in-progress that encourages continued contributions, updates and discussion. This article presents the objectives and methodology underpinning the project, in response to Cambodia’s traumatic twentieth-century history and the resulting loss of knowledge on textile and dress practices. Working across three languages, the glossary also highlights the historical and colonial connections behind the formation of a fashion and textile-related vocabulary in Cambodia. In line with decolonial efforts to expand fashion languages beyond western-centric perspectives, the glossary fosters accessibility, knowledge preservation and cross-cultural exchanges.
This article develops a theory of the performativity of dangerous fashion through an analysis of 1950s British Teddy Boy dress. Drawing on concepts of ‘performance’ and ‘performativity’ from theatre and performance studies, the article critiques the tendency in fashion scholarship to dichotomize these terms and advocates for a more integrated reading. The theory is articulated through three interconnected ‘zones of threat’: the active zone, where clothing enacts a live threat through embodied subcultural performance; the commercial zone, where commodification dilutes and distorts subcultural meaning while amplifying social anxiety; the dispersed zone, where stylistic remnants circulate through revivalist and derivative forms, sustaining symbolic menace. Using a qualitative content analysis of 1950s newspaper representations, the study positions Teddy Boy fashion not merely as a signifier of youth deviance but as a performative force that produces ontological disruption. This performativity reveals fashion’s capacity to constitute identity, provoke moral panic, and complicate the relationship between authenticity, threat and social control. Ultimately, the article proposes a framework for understanding dangerous fashion as a site of both constraint and subcultural intervention.
Despite the substantial increase in the dissemination of information demonstrating sustainable initiatives within the contemporary fashion and textile industry, we suggest that this narrative is dominated by large textile companies and brands. Additionally, knowledge production in fashion studies is still largely rooted in a Euro-American context. In light of this, there is an urgent need to broaden the scope of inquiry by incorporating peripheral perspectives and contextually grounded analyses. Based on a case study grounded in observation and interviews with women from the Costurando Sonhos Brasil organization, located in Parais & oacute;polis, we discuss waste management processes-specifically upcycling-as one of the solutions to the growing problem of textile waste. Our objective is to complexify the sustainability paradox in a sector that continues to project unlimited growth. For this, we examine textile waste in Brazil, which is growing exponentially due to the current production system, lacking means for reuse or recycling, whether due to unavailable technology or insufficient workforce. Furthermore, we analyse the contradictions in the practice of textile waste donation, which ultimately serves as a low-cost alternative for companies to outsource their waste management. By amplifying the voices of seamstresses from Brazilian peripheries-one of the most vulnerable segments of the production chain and often excluded from broader discourse-we aim to challenge the dominant narrative and underscore the importance of these overlooked perspectives.
This editorial endorses an approach to editing that centres care and relationality. It draws on literature on an ethics of care to argue for academic practice that recognizes relationality, interdependence and respect.
This article examines how weaving mediates grief through the transformation of garments belonging to the deceased. It focuses on the practice of Naarm (Melbourne)-based artist Mary Burgess and her project Woven Memories, revealing how clothing operates as a potent mnemonic object - at once a site of comfort, confrontation and emotional ambiguity for the grieving. The article considers how garments become 'what-if' objects that hold imagined returns, how certain items remain too laden with memory for disassembly, and how others can be materially reconfigured to sustain continuity and hope. By foregrounding labour, intimacy and affect in the making process, Burgess's work challenges dominant narratives of fashion's ephemerality and disposability, proposing instead that garments can sustain emotional afterlives beyond the wearer's death. Ultimately, this text proposes Woven Memories as a practice that not only repurposes textiles but also reworks the relationship between death, memory and dress, revealing how fashion might continue to live meaningfully in the wake of loss.
This article argues that the worsted muslin produced in modern Japan (1868- 1945) was a form of fashion deeply entangled with Japan's imperial expansion in the 1920s and early 1930s. Current research on Japanese mousseline de laine (worsted muslin) rarely deals with the question of how it was advertised, traded and worn outside of mainland Japan. Consequently, this article aims to analyse the economic and cultural roles of worsted muslin in modern Japan and China from a transnational perspective. The article shines a light on the worsted muslin industry in early twentieth-century Japan and on its impact in overseas markets, showing how the industry was related to transnational trade as well as to Japanese imperialism. Firstly, it details how worsted muslin exercised a significant role in pre-war Japan's economic and cultural development. Secondly, it argues that Japanese-made worsted muslin came to be seen as a symbol of Japanese nationalism and imperialism, as Japan's promotion of worsted muslin on the Asian continent coincided with the rise of an anti-Japanese movement in China. As a result, worsted muslin in China came to be seen as a symbol of Japan's imperialist escapades rather than a cultural export.
This article examines the themes and creative processes underlying TOTON 2025, a collection from the Indonesian fashion label TOTON. Unveiled on 27 October 2024 during the seventeenth iteration of Jakarta Fashion Week, the collection was presented as an immersive exhibition at the InterContinental Pondok Indah, marking a significant shift from the brand’s customary runway format. Developed amid heightened political instability, environmental challenges and global conflict, TOTON 2025 reflects the ways in which fashion can respond to sociopolitical conditions and articulate emotional and affective concerns. To contextualize the collection’s conceptual framework, the essay incorporates an interview with TOTON’s founder and designer, Toton Januar. The discussion foregrounds the principles that inform his practice, including his engagement with sustainability, cultural heritage and collaboration, particularly through the exhibition realized with the creative collective PEARS. Founded in 2012 by Januar and his partner, Haryo Balitar, TOTON has become recognized for its contemporary reinterpretations of Indonesian material and craft traditions. TOTON 2025 extends this trajectory by integrating local craftsmanship with ready-to-wear design while addressing broader social and cultural questions related to identity, resilience and shared human experience.
This article examines the growing popularity of silicone nipple covers among female consumers in mainland China, exploring how their material and haptic aesthetics resonate with cultural imaginations of 'natural beauty' in the Chinese context. In this study, we propose that these consumer products are not only practical accessories but also aesthetic objects that evoke what we term a 'skin-on-skin imagination' - a sensory fantasy in which the silicone material is imagined as an extension of the body's own skin, making the body paradoxically 'naturally beautiful'. We argue that silicone nipple covers are mediating agents that construct the connection between one's physical body and the cultural imagination of a beautiful body. Through a material-aesthetic lens grounded in new materialism and hapticity theory, we analyse how silicone's tactile properties facilitate this seamless embodiment and become central to cultural negotiations around femininity and self-presentation. Drawing on a case study of Chinese consumer discourse on the social media platform Xiaohongshu, we trace how female consumers experi-ence silicone nipple covers as both liberating and constraining, revealing layered tensions between comfort and discomfort, confidence and embarrassment and freedom and unfreedom. Ultimately, we argue that hapticity and materiality are often overlooked yet productive starting points for unpacking the complex negotia-tions between ideologies, embedded cultural values and everyday life as new global aesthetic trends are on the rise.
In 2017, various conservative, far-right and alternative-right (alt-right) groups banded together in Charlottesville, Virginia at the Unite the Right rally in efforts to protest the removal of a Confederate era monument in the city and to demonstrate unity among these activist factions. The rally served as a nucleation point for the examination of a new trend of political fashion as images of mostly white males dressed in white polos, button-front shirts and variations of khaki trousers decorated headlines. This shift into a seemingly bland smart-casual style marked a contemporary intrigue into how right-wing activists engage with fashion. Yet, the selection of such an aesthetic amid the increased US political turmoil of the time was neither random nor a fashion faux-pas, rather a reflection of far-right ideological perceptions of Americanness. In this article we explore a critical conjuncture of fashion and far-right political activism by examining the smart-casual uniforms of two contemporary far-right groups, the Patriot Front and the Proud Boys. Through a lens of cultural memory, this article demonstrates how the curated smart-casual style of far-right groups reifies their ideology through the presentation and abstraction of the myths and histories of American national identity.
In this piece, I set out to trace the contours of postfeminism in my upbringing. Believing it to be constitutive rather than manipulative of neo-liberal subjectivity, I reflect on the figure of the modern woman, from whom rigorous self-discipline and meticulous appearance management is not only expected but also constructed as pleasurable and freely chosen. In keeping with others, I believe she amounts to a sinister obfuscation of the heterosexist logics that subtend modern feminine subjectivities - and the political order itself. However, as I examine her, I realize she is ghosted by the paradoxical feminist potential of subjectivation through self-shattering. The modern woman is a site of self-authorization through citation, a process which undermines the construction of the neo-liberal subject as unitary, free and self-knowing. This undoes the very premise from which she emerges and postfeminism proceeds. While it has traditionally been the feminine's vulnerability that has rendered it abject, the modern woman is a feminist figuration, a betrayal of the way there is no subjectivity not defined by its mediation through others - by its very objectification. She is a shape-shifting presence whose contours might only be mapped provisionally before she recedes into the surfaces that project her: a glimmer, a glamour.
Silk production and consumption in Cambodia nearly halted during the Khmer Rouge regime (1975-79), and resumed in the post-conflict era under global and local dynamics that combined heritage and preservation policies with social and economic development. In the 1990s, foreign investment and humanitarian aid heavily changed the practice and significance of silk weaving and dress. Extant literature on Cambodian textile production and dress practices remains frag-mented and limited in scope, either discussing silk weaving as a traditional prac-tice or providing general facts and figures on the state of contemporary production as a struggling domestic industry. This article proposes to reframe the domestic commodity chain of Cambodian silk as a transnational network of exchanges, funding, textiles, fibre resources and actors inside and outside Cambodia, while also incorporating diasporic communities in the United States. It does so by using Appadurai's theorization of globalized flows and scapes and the de-hierarchized methodological approach of Actor-Network Theory to remap this cottage industry into a dynamic silkscape. The Cambodian silkscape incorporates the circulation of materials, skills, designs and people alike, including numerous stakeholders - weavers, middlemen, craft companies, international non-governmental organiza-tions and wearers, such as locals, tourists and Cambodians in the diaspora. This post-conflict landscape remains influenced by pre-existing Cambodian social and kinship systems such as the khsae, which means 'threads' or 'network' in Khmer. These invisible contractual links tying humans in unequal power relationships underpin the production and transfer of silk resources in Cambodia. By investigat-ing the inner organizational, material and social flows activating the Cambodian silkscape, this article aims to highlight the frictions, interdependence and imbal-ances in the local and transnational connections between materials, makers and wearers. Overall, it demonstrates how these inequitable power relations affect Cambodian silk production and trade and prevent its development into a socially and economically sustainable model.
This article explores how Disabled people develop social, relational and mate-rial structures, a framework I call crip fashion networks, to access clothing and cultivate fashion communities in response to their exclusion from the dominant fashion industry. Drawing on five representative narratives from wardrobe inter-views with Disabled men and masculine people, I theorize crip fashion networks as systems where Disabled people collectively build alternative fashion worlds outside of mainstream industry structures. Within these networks, I identify three crip strategies that sustain and animate them: crip exchanges, where Disabled people swap and share clothing; crip hacks, where Disabled people exchange styl-ing and dressing techniques that support their bodyminds; and crip confidence, where Disabled people affirm their fashioned identities through encounters and relationships. By mapping crip fashion networks, I extend past research in fashion studies that has primarily framed the relationship between fashion and disability through the lenses of industry or commodity. Instead, I conceptualize this relation-ship as a network generated through Disabled people's everyday acts of creativ-ity and collective care, acts that cultivate disability worlds rather than drive the growth of a capitalist industry.
Researchers have recognized that dress displays the intersection of various influ-ences affecting a society at any time. Dress reflects our interpretations of the physical setting, relationships (including with self), culture and known memory. Garments are also the culmination of their production processes - today, most dress is often tethered to spaces outside the society where they are used. In this sense, dress is both a localized indicator of the characteristics of its society and, more broadly, an indicator of the globalized fashion industry. The authors propose that a dress-led framework (DLF) is an unidentified strategy already used by those undertaking dress research. DLF is a conceptualization, data collection and analysis technique that begins with dress (e.g. written and visual representa-tions, artefacts and practices) and capitalizes on the affiliative qualities of dress to discover, document and understand aspects of society and culture. This article first discusses how DLF is employed in common dress research methods. Then, the framework is illustrated with two case studies. The first example applies DLF to field research documenting dress practices in a Tz'utujil Maya municipality in the Guatemalan Highlands. The second example discusses DLF as applied to a material culture analysis of five extant European and Euro-American gowns from the 1790s to the 1820s. In both cases, leading with dress throughout the data collection process permitted the studies to move forward in a manner that revealed dress' broader affiliations. Further leaning into the affiliative qualities of dress illuminated unexpected findings that might otherwise have gone unstudied. In summary, this article aims to recognize, exemplify and validate the affiliative dress-led approaches used by dress scholars.
Renting is an emerging practice within the field of fashion. It is promoted as both a means to access aspirational high-end garments and a way in which to consume more sustainably. As self-proclaimed newcomers to the field, rental companies must forge a new space by demonstrating both their fashionable taste and sustain-able credentials. To do so, they rely on a network of mediation which requalifies rented garments as sustainable by virtue of being shared. This requalification is not just carried out by the rental company but takes place between the rela-tional practices among both human and non-human actors. This article presents ethnographic research tracing networks of fashion rental both online and offline including rental garments, those renting and sharing images online and the algo-rithm which prioritizes content. Discourse analysis of digital content, qualitative interviews with rental users and autoethnographic reflection are methods used to explore how understanding of sustainable fashion practices and objects are shaped by the interactions and relations within this network of mediation.
In a 1935 photograph by Prentiss Taylor, the novelist and folklorist Zora Neale Hurston wears a black silk bolero and performs part of a Bahamian 'Fire Dance', collected as part of her anthropological fieldwork in the American South and Nassau. This visual essay proposes that Hurston's fashionable dress (boleros are everywhere in 1935) and the cross-racial, queer modernist milieu of Taylor's West Village apartment help visualize Hurston's philosophy of history, specifically folklore as a collective, living history. Fashion more broadly helps shape and visualize historicity: the experience of history and of being in history. Crucially to the theme of this Special Issue, historicity as described here - drawing on theories from philosophy of history and phenomenology of history - is an experience of the self in relation to others. The piece uses extensive visual content to emphasize the role of Hurston's dressed body in her version of historicity. It suggests we might think of this corporeal philosophy of history as 'historiobody', after Hayden White's 'historiophoty'. The essay was made using a web-based digital tool for telling multimedia stories that unfold on the reader's browser, developed by Dr Suzanne Churchill (Davidson) and John-Michael Murphy. The format reflects the essay's theory of historicity, in which clothes connect individuals to others in time and aspects of the past are remade in the present, creating a shared history in the making.
This article aims to recontextualize the work of French fashion designer Sonia Rykiel from an affiliative point of view by disentangling the various relations caught up in the materialization of her designs. In her d & eacute;mode manifesto from 1977, Rykiel states that her design practice was a way of 'translating the political mood of the day', a statement against fashion's time-based hierarchies of trends and diktats. Through a concentric, relational reading of these creations, informed by mood theory, as well as feminist notions related to the sociocultural milieu of Rykiel, such as H & eacute;l & egrave;ne Cixous's notion of & eacute;criture feminine and Antoinette Fouque's libido creandi, the article aims to draw out the importance of a relational perspective for fashion studies. By elucidating how a design poetic can express the changes in mood of a certain time, place and sociocultural milieu, we can under-stand how it can, in turn, affect this milieu and its mood.
Fashion is not only a tool for the creation and expression of individual identity and empowerment. It is additionally an active agent of socialization, and its ability to connect humans, non-humans and ideas in complex networks and interactions is equally important. The article analyses the phenomenon of affiliative fashion in the Polish sociocultural context, with a particular focus on the bonding role of fash-ion. It is based on the results of the author's research carried out with the unique Zaltman metaphor elicitation technique (ZMET (c)): study of attitudes towards fashion and the ways in which it is practised by Polish women (research carried out under an NCN grant in 2014-17) and Polish men (research carried out under a grant from the Faculty of Sociology of the Adam Mickiewicz University in 2021). The research and method formulated in this way facilitated the capture of multidimensional aspects of fashion along with various personal strategies, which makes these studies unique and extremely valuable.
