I am delighted to report that Peter McNeil, the long-time Book Editor of Fashion Theory, has agreed to co-edit the journal with me. Peter remembers seeing in the National Gallery of Australia an early copy of the journal with a photograph by Madame Yevonde on the cover, and finding it a revelation. He first published in Fashion Theory in 1999. He will also continue to be in charge of book reviews at this time. Meanwhile, Alexandra Palmer has stepped down as Exhibitions Editor, and Hazel Clark has agreed to take on the position. I thank Alex for the incredible work she has done over many years to bring astute and critical reviews concerning fashion in the museum around the world. She has done our community a great long-term service. I am so grateful to all three of them. A journal like this is only possible thanks to the hard work of everyone involved, including all peer reviewers.
This issue of Fashion Theory opens with “Dress Like a Mum/Mom: Instagram Style Mums and the Fashionable Ideal” by Joanne Entwistle and Elizabeth Wissinger. This fascinating and theoretically sophisticated article explores whether (or to what extent) social media such as Instagram “opens new spaces” where a range of “mums” with ordinary “maternal bodies” can “perform fashionability” in ways that challenge “the dominant fashionable ideal.” I was especially intrigued by their analysis of how the “The aesthetic tropes of ‘mum style’… unpack the contradictions and possibilities of this space.” Anyone interested in the subject of fashion and the media (and who isn’t?) will want to read this article and study the featured images.
Images from Instagram are among the many compelling photographs that contribute to the impact of “Fashion in Cuba as Revolt, and the Horror of the Nonproductive” by Jeannine Diego. Drawing on the work of Georges Bataille to explore fashion’s “uselessness,” Diego investigates fashion practice in contemporary Cuba, using specific examples from 2019 in support of her argument that “the Cuban fashion praxis as destructive revolt … subverts and breaks with the historicist narrative of both capitalism and the Cuban Revolution.”
Natalia Särmäkari addresses the sudden ubiquity of digital design in her “Digital 3D Fashion Designers: Cases of Atacac and The Fabricant.” Her work is situated within a Finnish strategic funded research cluster “intimacy in data-driven culture.” She provides a fascinating account of how technology and culture drive new meanings and possibilities for the fashion designer, from the world of Worth to “Fashion 4.0: the Fourth Industrial Revolution” today, which “operates in cyber-physical space” with a new range of decentralized, modular and inter-operable capabilities. Her work examines the ethical and intellectual property rights matters raised by blockchain-authenticated digital collections as well as the world of new fashion design work. How does the recent focus on “embodied” fashion relate to the world of pixels and bytes?
Nicola Brajato’s “Masculinity, Identity and Body Politics in the Interzone: A Queer Perspective on Raf Simons’s Critical Fashion Practices (1995–2005)” examines the liberation of men’s fashion from being the “little brother” of womenswear. Brajato does not argue that Simons’s fashion design is necessarily queer; rather that it expands the “semantic horizons” of menswear and the male silhouette. Simons, he argues, works within a space of intersection or “interzone” which can be traced back to William Burroughs and later post-punk appropriations. This article is part of a much wider program of the study of men’s fashion conducted by Brajato and reinforces the mood of academic excitement being generated in this field.
Reviews in this issue range from the world of print and paint to the well-traversed but still fascinating world of the dandy. Tirza Westland reviews “Print and Paint: 350 Years of Flowers on Cotton” at Kasteel d’Ursel, Belgium. This latter castle is remarkable for the survival there of many early chintz wall coverings, which provided the spur to an exhibition concerning the chintz clothes and accessories of both everyday and elite eighteenth-century Flemish consumers.
Joshua M. Bluteau reviews “Undercover – From Necessity to Luxury: The Evolution of Face Coverings during COVID-10,” an exhibition at the Westminster Menswear Archive, which is still accessible on Instagram. Curated by Andrew Groves and Danielle Sprecher, the exhibition “holds a mirror to the fashion industry” by showing how surgical-style masks were “situate[d]… within the fashion-conscious imagination,” resulting in examples such a Louis Vuitton mask “in the brand’s monogramed fabric.”
Dominic Janes’ book, British Dandies: Engineering Scandal and Fashioning a Nation, is reviewed by Katherine Herold-Zanker, who observes that “Effeminacy became the trademark problem for British dandies who were met with mockery in the press.” Although “richly illustrated and drawing on a wealth of scholarship,” the book sometimes “lacks focus. More selective and in-depth attention to the fractures dandyism made visible in the formation of a sense of Britishness would have helped the reader to establish the ambiguities and alternative ways of viewing such a history.”
Fashion scholars interested in editing a special edition of Fashion Theory should contact us.
Valerie Steele and Peter McNeil