‘Lookism’ is a term that has emerged in recent decades to describe appearance biases or discrimination. Although the term had not been used until the twentieth century, beauty bias has existed since ancient times. In recent history, the term was developed to capture social injustices based on how one appears. Individuals perceived as unattractive are discriminated against in hiring practices and experience shame and health issues such as anxiety, anorexia and depression. Some clarity is needed to address how lookism is defined and examined. We think it can be a useful concept for beauty scholars to better understand perceived appearances, bridging across looks that include both the body and dress. Therefore, we systematically examined scholarly literature since the term’s inception and/or scholarly works on the topic’s availability online to identify how lookism has been defined and measured across time. We completed a content analysis to identify the themes and methods used to study lookism. Our focus included the context of lookism (e.g. the workplace), definitions of lookism, sample characteristics and approaches to measurement. We found 65 scholarly works on lookism using multiple definitions and representing a recent rise in scholarship and suggest that this increase may be related to technological advances and social media, as well as awareness regarding issues of social inclusion, with recent scholarship using lookism to capture the discriminatory nature of lookism. There were gaps in the literature on lookism, such as limited studies that considered clothing. Fashion and beauty scholars can work together to fill these gaps.
Referencing Plato’s lost city of Atlantis, British fashion designer Alexander McQueen’s Plato’s Atlantis (S/S 2010) envisioned a dystopian future where humans, aided by bioengineering, adapt to water following rising sea levels caused by global warming. Through the collection’s ensembles, which mimicked the skin and scales of aquatic animals, and through prosthetic make-up that altered beauty codes, the other-worldly models embodied a subsequent step in evolution resulting from a posthuman hybridization between the human and the amphibian. This article analyses McQueen’s Plato’s Atlantis guided by recent theorizations on the new-materialist and posthuman turn in fashion, and, in particular, on Astrida Neimanis’s notion of ‘bodies of water’ – a theoretical paradigm that rearticulates the ontological category of the ‘human’ as connected to the Earth’s hydrological systems, thereby blurring the boundaries between self, environment and other water forms. Plato’s Atlantis is, therefore, another example of how fashion engages with the ontological debates advanced by posthumanism and post-anthropocentrism. By staging the process of becoming-amphibian, McQueen decentred the human subject to offer alternative figurations of the dressed body, establishing connections with non-human and technological actors, and ultimately disrupting an anthropocentric model of subjectivity in favour of mixed, fluid and watery ontological borders.
Review of: Technology, Sustainability and the Fashion Industry: Can Fashion Save the World? , Annick Schramme and Nathalie Verboven (eds) (2024) London and New York: Routledge, 314 pp., ISBN 978-1-03265-850-6, e-book, EUR 49.29
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
