Fashion futures and critical fashion studies

Keywords:

• fashion
• ethical consumption
• global supply chains
• modern slavery
• critical fashion studies

Fashion futures

The introduction maps the emerging field of critical fashion studies, whereby the ‘critical’ in this context marks the networks of influence and overlap between Cultural Studies and Fashion Studies. It brings together Cultural Studies’ long-established interest in social and economic inequality, consumer habits, mediated experience and everyday tastes as well as a more recent focus on environmentalism and the Asia-Pacific region, with fashion studies’ interest in aesthetics and design, clothing and the body, sustainability and curatorial and business practices, to understand the new theoretical and real-world problems facing the future of fashion. While fashion studies emerged out of a rich sociological and philosophical tradition that positioned clothing and fashion at the core of our social processes and indeed central to the sensibility of the modern self, critical fashion studies turns to the newly emerging material, political, and environmental ontologies of fashion production and consumption in order to map some of the possible futures emerging from fashion as a critical and practical enterprise in an age of increasing social and environmental precarity.

Introduction

Over the last decade, fashion has emerged as a key site in which debates about social and environmental responsibility, and their gendered, socio-economic, and spatial dimensions, have intensified. This special issue on ‘Fashion Futures’ brings together the material, aesthetic and ethical practices of fashion with cultural studies’ approaches to sustainability and the micropolitical practices of cultural production and consumption (Littler 2009; Lewis and Potter 2011; Hawkins, Potter, and Race 2015; Probyn 2016). It focuses on fashion as a cultural practice and creative industry but also crucially as an epistemological opportunity, where aesthetics, consumption practices, digital media landscapes, and technological innovation are being shaped by local and global landscapes of activism and critical enterprise. It explores the intersection of new media practices and sustainable fashion entrepreneurialism in forging forms of resistance to the mainstream fashion industry. But it also crucially examines how the targeting of fast fashion as the bête noire of labour exploitation and environmental degradation may occlude other structural inequalities and blind spots, including ethical fashion itself as ‘a new layer of commodity fetishism’ (Gunderson 2014) or optimized individuality (Binkley 2008), or as a register of gendered moral blame and responsibility (Horton 2018). It also examines how mediated forms of outrage culture around sustainability often bear little relation to the complexity of a deregulated global fashion industry, the dependency of livelihoods on that industry, let alone the agency and political will of garment workers themselves.

The collection asks how a shared dialogue between small- and large-scale fashion enterprises, and between researchers and those working at all levels in the industry, benefit from a holistic approach to building more responsible forms of fashion production and consumption but also, crucially, activism. To ask for more responsible forms of activism is to reflect on how efforts within the fashion sector are always entangled with global and local forces often not captured by the clear-cut rationales driving boycotts or slogans. Although boycotts and social media campaigns have played an important role in calling for change, to over-valorize the freedom of the consumer to act ethically risks minimizing the effects of deregulated global markets and systemic structural inequality. Invoking these broader global forces and stratifications does not mean we necessarily need to give up on ambitious forms of change, but it might mean that collective responsibility should be more attuned to what Lauren Berlant has defined as ‘the increasing corrosion of security as a condition of life for workers across different concentrations of economic and political privilege’ (2011, 193; original emphasis). ‘Fashion Futures’ takes the corrosion of security as the demand for a more just transition to a sustainable future for the environment, and for the workers and communities that inhabit it.

Why cultural studies needs fashion

To think critically about fashion entails both a critique of commodity forms enmeshed in global systems of production and political formations and an understanding of fashion as an assemblage of micro-political and aesthetic practices. Critical fashion studies positions fashion as a critical and material enterprise that works across cultural studies’ multi-focused lens of epistemological inquiry and empirical methods but also, importantly, social justice. While food studies, ocean studies, and animal studies have all risen to prominence within cultural studies, fashion studies feels as though it has come and gone but at the same time never fully arrived within the discipline. As Elizabeth Wilson contends, ‘because fashion is constantly denigrated, the serious study of fashion has had repeatedly to justify itself’ (2007, 15). This ambivalence to fashion registers the long-held suspicion about the feminization of commodity culture, with fashion as its most conspicuous and spectacular form, occasioning what Meaghan Morris described as ‘the lived ambiguity’ (1998, 207) of consumption practices. More recently, that ‘lived ambiguity’ has been registered as the site of the ‘ethical turn’ in fashion, bringing in newer forms of heightened moralism and discourses of shame. Additionally, fashion has been marginalized as a creative industry and as a site of rich knowledge production and innovation.

As a far-reaching eco-system, the Australian Fashion Council (AFC) reported in 2021 that, despite the effects of the global Covid-19 pandemic, the Australian fashion and textile industry contributed over $27 billion to the Australian economy in 2020/21, generating over $7 billion in export revenue (twice as much as beer and wine). The Australian fashion industry has also been a leader in innovation, addressing the new challenges of digital transformation, circular and transparent business practices, and sustainable textiles. And yet traditionally the fashion industry has been overlooked as a substantial contributor to Australia’s export industry or beneficiary of federally funded innovation and manufacturing grants, especially compared to other non-feminized industries, such as wine, beef, and energy – although this is now beginning to change.¹ It has always been the case that the fashion system is overwhelmingly dominated by women, from garment workers and shop assistants to fashion scholars and writers, activists, and entrepreneurs. In Australia alone, 77% of those employed in the fashion and textile industry are women. It is only at the most prestigious level, the level of fashion design that men dominate, although in Australia and New Zealand successful women designers have fared well. Those who work in the fashion and textile industry are some of our most vulnerable workers, from garment workers most recently affected by Covid-19 and the cancellation of orders by multinational brands (Khan and Richards 2021) to sustainable fashion designers and entrepreneurs for whom there is high cost of emotional labour and little financial reward (Heinze 2020). Given that women’s work is undervalued, increasingly so during the pandemic, even as gains in other areas of women’s lives have improved, this brief snapshot of the fashion and textile industry in Australia gives us some insight into why fashion has been at the margins of recognition as an important creative industry and as a site of fertile knowledge production.

If, as Angela Carter once remarked, ‘Nobody who feels superior to fashion can write well about it’ (Angela Carter 1985), could it be that Cultural Studies has, at different moments, felt a little superior to the world of fashion? There are, of course, some notable exceptions that reveal the productive coalescence of fashion and cultural studies: Rimi Khan’s analysis of the idealized discourses of empowerment in ethical fashion enterprises in Bangladesh (2019); Min-Ha T. Pham’s sobering work on the limits of ethical consumerism and fashion (2017) and global supply chains (2020); Angela McRobbie’s large project on the creative industries which includes the successes and perils of fashion micro-enterprises (2016); Andrew Ross’s pioneering work on garment workers (1997) and on consumer-based activism (2008); Susan B. Kaiser’s Fashion and Cultural Studies (2012), which demonstrates how cultural studies relies on fashion and how fashion studies benefits from the critical tools of cultural studies; and Joanne Entwistle’s analysis of the aesthetic economy of fashion (2009). All of these followed in the wake of Jennifer Craik’s seminal The Face of Fashion: Cultural Studies in Fashion (1994), which put fashion on the cultural studies map through its analysis of the complex relationship between designer fashion and everyday fashion or ‘fashionability’ in ways that disrupted an over-simplified ‘trickle down’ model or teleological narratives of consumer capitalism. Wilson’s ([1985]1987) early attention to fashion and modernity from the vantage point of critical theory and cultural history also established the importance of aesthetics, from a feminist perspective, in shaping broader social, cultural, and economic relations. Similarly, Ulrich Lehmann’s analysis of the revolutionary impetus of fashion, by way of his close reading of Walter Benjamin and his milieu, brought into stark relief the philosophical dimensions of fashion as ‘the supreme expression’ of modern life as transitory and fragmentary (2000: xii). Adam Geczy and Vicki Karaminas’s examination of critical fashion designers, from Vivienne Westwood and Rei Kawakubo to Gareth Pugh and Rad Hourani, reveals how particular forms of fashion design and practice are not merely critically alive to the socio-political landscape, but actively shape it (2017). This list, of course, does not include the many brilliant fashion studies scholars (too many to name) working across a variety of disciplines, from art history and film studies, to historical studies, sociology, anthropology, and gender studies, many of whom also draw on the critical tools of cultural studies.

Increasingly, however, fashion as a creative industry and as an everyday aesthetic practice cuts across many of our most pressing problems: sustainability, globalization, decolonization, aesthetic distinction, and consumer responsibility and activism. The ethical turn in fashion has perhaps brought it even closer to cultural studies’ interest in radical consumption practices (Littler 2009) but even here the multi-dimensional nature of fashion as a critical and creative practice gets subsumed by the broader anxieties and heightened moral castigation of commodity culture. While the ethical turn in fashion has played an important role in refocusing the hidden social and environmental costs of the fashion industry, from the anti-sweatshop movements of the 1990s to the more recent digital media campaigns such as #fashionrevolution and #whomademyclothes, increasingly these campaigns have become more intensified forms of ‘cosmopolitan caring’ (Littler 2009) that do little to secure ‘labor rights for workers in the global South through political tactics that [appeal] primarily to the conscience of consumers in the North’ (Ross 2008, 772). As Ross argues, this risks staging ‘a fragile connection between … unequal communities [that] is not easy to maintain beyond the duration of a few news cycles’ (772) or indeed short-lived social media feeds. The perils of social media-oriented activism in an over-cooked information landscape adds to the sense in which media forms of environmentalism are increasingly discursive practices of the virtuous and privileged, blind to the ways in which environmentalism sets in place feelings of shame and blame for those already marginalized or fails to recognize existing raced and classed burdens of responsibility and survivability beyond saving the planet (Seymour 2018).

The recent introduction of the Australian Modern Slavery Act in 2018 (following on from similar legislation in California and the UK) nevertheless might be one indication that this increased activism in the fashion sector and elsewhere has slowly pressured governments to address the lack of transparency of supply chains in a deregulated global market. While the Australian Modern Slavery Act is far from perfect (tellingly there are no penalties for failing to report or for inaccurate reporting) it has begun to attract a wider critical audience concerned with modern forms of slavery and human rights abuses, from politicians and shareholders to scholars and consumers. It has also begun to shift responsibility from individual consumers to multinational corporations who risk being named and shamed for failure to report information about where and how their goods are made. While the new Act has increased pressure on large businesses to understand the traceability of their supply chains in ways that make the transparency of fashion a far-reaching concern, it is too early to predict how effective the legislation will be in reducing exploitative and enforced forms of labour.

Critical fashion studies

Critical fashion studies takes the complex interwoven ecologies of fashion as a set of concerns in the present to think across the competing pressure points that make fashion a critically dynamic ‘problem.’ Celia Lury (2021) has recently defined a ‘problem space’ as a process in the making, shifting away from the problem as a contained entity (with a set of givens, goals, and operators), and instead identifying the coming into being of the problem in tandem with its methodology. In this way ‘the becoming of the problem’ is, as she argues, compositional, in that it ‘describe[s] a methodology in which the focus is on the ways in which a problem is put together, how it is formed and transformed, inventively (Lury and Wakeford 2012)’ (Lury 2021, 2–3). As the essays in this special issue demonstrate, critical fashion studies draws on a range of interdisciplinary tools to address the emergent and contingent configurations of fashion, cognizant of the tangible and creative as much as the illusive and detrimental. If, as Lury argues, a problem space is ‘a space of methodological potential,’ how might critical fashion studies offer cultural studies new ways to activate the present, both diagnostically and laterally? As Ilya Parkins suggests, ‘the fashion system is an ideal diagnostic tool for the contemporary moment’ (2018, 426), one which might offer cultural studies new insights into the entanglements between gender, labour, aesthetics, and commodities. The methodological approaches developed via critical fashion studies, as the essays here show, contribute novel insights into global labour markets and economies, consumption practices, new biotechnologies, and everyday practices in ways that are experimentally alive to ambivalence and contingency as well as creativity and speculation. This side of fashion studies, however, is often drowned out by the polarizing voices of critics and advocates alike. To move beyond the polarizing configurations that have traditionally marked approaches to fashion (between superficiality and creativity, between denigration and celebration, between ethical consumption as a social movement and ethical consumption as another form of commodity capitalism) requires a geo-political recalibration of the fashion system’s diffuse knowledge claims, at a time when competing regimes of truth and veracity within a decentred world require ever more vigilant scrutiny.

To rethink the geo-political in new ways might mean that we don’t always look to Western environmental or anti-consumer campaigns to find inventive examples of political work in the fashion sector. The recent mobilization of Myanmar garment workers in opposition to the military coup that ousted the civilian government in early 2021 is a potent example of local forms of militancy co-opting global infrastructures. Workers and trade union leaders from the garment industry, mostly women, have played a prominent role in organizing militant protests against the coup whilst mobilizing international media outlets to call on multinational fashion brands to boycott Myanmar garment factories. The swift mobilization of this workforce was made possible because of an existing highly unionized garment industry, formed locally in response to Myanmar’s relatively late entry into garment manufacturing (Paul 2021). As images of garment workers were splashed across the international media, multi-national brands such as H&M and Zara were called upon to take a political stance against the military, and in this instance rose to the challenge and boycotted factories, many of them Chinese-owned and suspected of supporting the coup leaders. While garment workers in the global South are all too frequently represented as in need of ‘saving’ by expert forms of knowledge and political activism in the West (Khan 2019; Pham 2017), this event tells a different story, one far removed from the tokenistic visibility of the garment worker as the person who made our clothes, splashed across brand websites and social media feeds. This event requires us to recognize the role of Myanmar garment workers in shaping geo-political forces and their own livelihoods, if not their lives, through locally informed investments in unionized labour in the fashion sector. But it is also about a temporary alliance, for political ends, between garment workers and multinational corporations, one initiated by garment workers themselves.

Lury’s recalibration of the problem space as a way to overcome despair and inertia offers critical fashion studies an opportunity to capture the diversity of work undertaken in the name of ethical and sustainable fashion, responsive to the complex nexus between gender, race, labour, and commodity culture in ways that do justice to the precarious, though no less militant, subjects for whom fashion and clothing remain sites of meaningful economic, social, political and cultural work. But critical fashion studies also remains attuned to the everyday and sometimes more mundane practices and activities of fashion, such as falling in love with a garment, curating a wardrobe, navigating value beyond monetary worth, or repairing and caring for one’s clothes. It is in these more routine experiences that the ambivalence of fashion often takes hold or at least becomes most visible. As Elizabeth Chin (2016) reminds us, the things in our life, the things we come to love, such as a pair of purple shoes, are always registered ambivalently, what she describes as ‘the war of … contradictory desires’, a battle between relishing in the act of consuming and falling in love with particular objects and feeling an almost palpable repulsion towards the excess of accumulated stuff. But Chin’s larger point here, through her close reading of Marx’s domestic and somewhat contradictory life, is to fully account for ‘the realness of competing demands, disparate desires, inchoate needs’ (2016, 28). If cultural studies has long been interested in everyday forms of consumption and consumer agency, we need to take seriously the joy and satisfaction as well as the meaning and value that fashion provides for practitioners, consumers and workers. In this regard, designers, garment workers, researchers, activists, businesses, consumers, wearers, and advocates are differently situated workers, for whom the meaning of fashion sometimes coalesces and at other times is radically different. While the ethical turn has taken fashion into new and productive networks of knowledge and everyday assemblages, these require continuous reflection as part of an ever-evolving ‘problem space’, which would include fashion’s more ordinary attributes, given clothing is an everyday necessity that implicates even the most disinterested clothing wearer in the social and environmental costs of fashion. Understanding the failures, as well as the successes, of shopping ethically might also bring us closer to the impediments that drive the gap between the consumer’s noble intention to buy ethically and actual consumer behaviour. But if we continue to address fashion in monolithic despairing terms instead of addressing the diverse social, economic, and environmental ecologies that inhabit the fashion system, we risk falling into the often self-serving trap of divisive scapegoating. This is not to minimize the need for change or the very real environmental and social harms that the production and consumption of fashion invariably entail, but to recognize that there are alternatives between what Littler describes as ‘corporate utopianism around the potential of radical consumption’ and ‘a dystopian rejection that devalues its significance’ (2009, 5).

Fashion futures: the essays

The essays in this collection address the creative, social, material, environmental, technological, and political forms of fashion and clothing, drawing on a range of interdisciplinary methods to get to the heart of thinking fashion critically. The essays are drawn from conversations emerging from critical fashion studies events hosted at the University of Melbourne in 2019 and 2020. Contributors include both established and emerging fashion and cultural studies scholars from across the region, using a cross-section of practice-based, empirical and theoretical methods to address a wide range of topics. These include new biotechnologies transforming textile production; the feminization of responsibility in the broader ethical and sustainable fashion dialogue; tensions between local practices and global markets; the rise of popular feminism in digital fashion activism; systems of clothing care and longevity; practices of scale; networks of creativity and solidarity; the necessity to rethink value; and potential new sites for resistance and mobilization, innovation and novel methods. ‘Fashion Futures’ applies a critical lens to some of the deep tensions informing the ethical turn in fashion production and consumption, including ‘greenwashing’ and Western-centric moralities that flatten the lived realities of garment workers and fashion enterprises in the global South, the viability of small-scale sustainable fashion enterprises, mediated forms of fashion consumer citizenship and activism, and new high tech and lo-fi biotechnologies reshaping debates about eco-materials.

Annisa Beta and Rimi Khan open this special issue with a timely reminder of the rich diversity of creative labour and entrepreneurship in the fashion sector, contributing new insights about how ideas of ‘ethics’ and ‘community’ are deployed differently in ways that de-centre fashion as primarily a creative industry of the global North. While Beta examines how the expanding Muslim fashion industry combines new forms of ethical entrepreneurship with pious femininity to drive an expanded market for ‘pious fashion’ in Indonesia, she nevertheless argues that this is not simply the commodification of religion, but a complex pious habitus that reflects a number of competing local formations. These involve traditional ideas of pious Muslim womanhood and new forms of ethical entrepreneurship informed by the rise of creative and digital economies, which bring new forms of visibility and pious respectability to fashion entrepreneurs. Such ethical entrepreneurship in Indonesia, as Beta reveals, is tied to forms of pious self-cultivation central to the success of modest fashion business owners, but which often occlude class differences and the labour conditions of garment workers.

Khan, through her examination of the luxury fashion label, Aranya, based in Dhaka, Bangladesh, finds a new model of entrepreneurship that through a considered attention to practices of scale and reciprocity acknowledges the particularity of place and the challenge of intercultural reciprocity for sustainable fashion enterprises. By tuning in to the cross-cultural relationships that underpin the sustainable fashion practices of Aranya, including the navigation of different registers of cultural and economic value, Khan brings to light forms of intercultural exchange that are framed in terms of generosity and solidarity. As such, Khan demonstrates the way in which neo-colonial understandings of the ‘local’ often miss the agency of local practices in shaping the global rather than merely being an effect of, or resistant to, the global. Through attention to the ‘more than local’ as it unfolds in her case study of Aranya, Khan brings a critical locational politics that disrupts the reductive local/global binaries in existing scholarly approaches to ethical and sustainable fashion.

Lisa Heinze and Alison Gwilt turn to the everyday practices and emotions of dressing and caring for garments, affording us insights into the everyday perspectives of clothing wearers in Australia and the UK. Heinze, in the spirit of Lury’s aim to think through problems via new methodological approaches, utilizes ‘wardrobe examinations’ to unravel the everyday emotions, motivations and aesthetic choices informing fashion purchases. Drawing on social practice theory to get to the heart of how items in an individual’s wardrobe are chosen, valued, and cared for alongside the emotions and practical consideration that inform the purchase of individual garments, Heinze argues that we need to understand the complexity of people’s relationship with clothing before sustainability might be meaningfully factored into clothing purchases. Responding to the problem of textile waste and the increasingly short lifespan of the garments we purchase, Gwilt investigates the practices and attitudes of garment wearers who repair and care for their clothes, thus extending the life of their garments. Building on the existing data on why clothing users habitually discard items of clothing (lack of repair skills and the appeal of inexpensive clothing), Gwilt’s investigation is twofold, focusing on those users who do care for and repair items of clothing, and also the kinds of garments that are cared for and maintained for extended periods of time. Drawing on interviews with clothing users and data gathered from repair workshops, Gwilt offers a thick descriptive account of the garment/user relationship that builds a complex picture of what Alison Gill identifies as ‘a space of everyday inhabitance, dwelling and self-configuration,’ giving rise, as she suggests, to the often-repeated phrase ‘like a second skin’ (2007, 504). Understanding why we become attached to particular garments in our wardrobe, wearing them frequently, and hence dutifully attending to their maintenance and care, has the potential, according to Gwilt, to rethink the way we design and manufacture clothes. By turning on its head the rationale for good design (starting with an understanding of a wearer’s comfort and attachment to certain clothing items), Gwilt shows how new practices of care around clothing may be factored in from the very beginning of the design process.

Kathleen Horton and Paige Street turn to the dissemination of popular forms of feminism in digital fashion activism to query how the concept of feminist solidarity, employed in online campaigns such as Fashion Revolution’s #whomademyclothes (WMMC), reproduces a reductive gendered binary of ethical fashionability in the global North and labour injustice and victimhood in the global South. Drawing on Sarah Banet-Weiser’s attention to the neoliberal formations of choice and agency governing popular feminism, they argue that ethical fashion campaigns constitute a form of sartorially inflected self-entrepreneurship. Horton and Street nevertheless contend that they also extend forms of participatory girl culture by navigating the tensions between the pleasures of consumption and the increasing demands of ethical consumer citizenship. As such, they argue that although Fashion Revolution and its various digital campaigns are cognizant of the vectors of power and mobility that inform feminist activism, they nevertheless risk reinforcing static gendered binaries of empowerment and vulnerability.

Luis Quijano, Robert Speight and Alice Payne team up to examine how biotechnology maps out a future for fashion informed by both high-tech industry and DIY culture that is greener and more environmentally sustainable. Working at the intersection of microbial biotechnology and fashion design, the three co-authors explore how biotechnology may offer the fashion sector less harmful textile alternatives, firstly through the theme of ‘taming’ that looks at the increasing emergence of industrial-scale replacement of fossil-fuel-based fibres with bio-based equivalents. Moving beyond solutions that remain within industry norms, the authors also explore the theme of ‘rewilding,’ turning to community led initiatives aimed at creating open-access biotechnologies for small-scale biotextile production for designers and entrepreneurs, sidestepping corporatized industrial processes that rely on high-tech, laboratory-derived processes. What is striking here is the use of digital media to share knowledge and resources to extend makerspaces and lab communities virtually, so that home-grown biotextiles are being used in novel ways by ordinary citizens to tackle real-world problems, most recently in the form of biodegradable face masks made from bacterial cellulose. While neither ‘taming’ or ‘rewilding’ biotech solutions have resulted in widespread uptake in the fashion sector, they have carved out an important space for speculation and experimentation that has led to the development of novel fibres, materials and processes that offer hope for a more sustainable fashion and textile industry and, in the process, build hope for embryonic possible futures. Like the care and repair skills examined by Gwilt, rewilding fashion draws on the resources and skills of local and virtual communities sharing knowledge and practices that provide a counter future to global capitalism’s logic of endless extraction.

In her forensic examination of ‘radical transparency’ deployed variously in the fashion sector to communicate supply chain details, Harriette Richards ponders the question of value beyond its usual monetary associations or indeed how value is traditionally understood by either producers or consumers. Turning to the use of ‘transparency’ as a marketing strategy in two global fashion brands (Everlane and Nudie Jeans) and in one smaller, circular fashion label (A.BCH), Richards discovers that while some brands use transparency to focus on the breakdown of cost and supply chain details, more effective approaches such as that used by A.BCH detach value from cost almost entirely. Instead, they narrativize the garment’s provenance through a ‘Product Story.’ As Richards contends, this provides consumers with a clear account of all dimensions of the garment, including instructions for its care after purchase, in ways that may be more appealing for consumers but also challenge existing systems of value readily associated with consumption. By interrogating how transparency is put into practice, Richards shows the varied meanings and practices of transparency, from its use as yet another marketing tool to its potential to educate consumers about garment manufacturing, or indeed the way it builds narratives that feed into our attachment to things beyond their putative material or economic value.

‘Fashion Futures’ concludes with an edited version of an industry-facing dialogue that took place at the Critical Fashion Studies conference in February 2020, involving an Indigenous fashion activist, a circular fashion consultant and a circular fashion designer. In addressing small- and large-scale forms of complexity that now inhabit the ethical fashion space, these industry practitioners have much to teach us about creative and collaborative practices that extend the diversity of fashion narratives and voices, from decolonizing Australian fashion to building individual and collective forms of responsibility through circular fashion systems and transparent supply chains. This dialogue demonstrates the importance of forging connections across industry, academia, and entrepreneurial practitioners that build individual and collective forms of responsibility, and in the process develop resources of hope for the future of sustainable and ethical fashion practices.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Natalya Lusty

Natalya Lusty is Professor of Cultural Studies and an ARC Future Fellow (2018–2021) at the University of Melbourne. Her work examines the relationship between modernist cultural and political formations and contemporary aesthetic, political, and vernacular practices. Her Future Fellowship project investigates how the department store became an important institution for the transnational dissemination of modernist and avant-garde aesthetics alongside its cultivation of new forms of creative and innovative forms of consumption. Natalya is the author of Surrealism, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 2017); Dreams and Modernity: A Cultural History, co-authored with Helen Groth (Routledge, 2013); Photography and Ontology: Unsettling Images, co-edited with Donna West Brett (Routledge, 2019), Winner, Best Anthology in the Association of Australia and New Zealand Art Writing and Publishing Awards (AWAPA); Modernism and Masculinity (Cambridge University Press, 2014), shortlisted for the Modernist Studies Association book prize, and Cambridge Critical Concepts: Surrealism (CUP, 2021).

Notes

1. See Australian Fashion Council Report, ‘From High Fashion to High Vis: Australia’s Fashion and Textile Industry,’ 31 May 2021. https://ausfashioncouncil.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/From-high-fashion-to-high-vis-EY-final-report-31-May-2021.pdf