Fashion editors used to be powerful figures in the fashion system, but today there are a range of voices that serve as “intermediaries between producers and consumers.” Marco Pedroni and Emanuela Mora explore the three “main processes” responsible for this development in their important article, “Influencers, Niche Magazines and Journalistic Practice in Italy: Toward a New Fashion Editorial System.” The rise of social media made it possible for online bloggers and influencers to challenge the authority of fashion professionals working in traditional media. Niche magazines also emerged both in print and online, but these positioned themselves, not as the democratic voice of the people, but rather as sophisticated, independent, and “not-for-all editorial products” – in contrast to the mainstream fashion editorial system, which are increasingly depicted as commercial and homogenizing. Taking the story up to the present, the authors explore players in the system aim for goals ranging from “symbolic authority” to “commercial success.”
Rachel Lamarche-Beauchesene in “Reviving the Silenced; Defining Vegan Fashion and Classifying Materials of Animal Origin” looks at the effect of veganism on the fashion industry. This is an important article which considers a topic which has intrigued reformers since the Revolutionary period. The Animal Rights movement emerged from the anti-human slavery (Abolitionist) movement of the Enlightenment. In 1789 Jeremy Bentham argued for animal rights. Early vegan campaigner Lewis Gompertz joined with Wilberforce in 1824 for the first meeting of what became the RSPCA. Henry Salt’s Animals Rights Considered in Relation to Social Progress (1892) founded the basis of speciesism, promoted vegetarianism, and developed models of pacificist and civil disobedience. The author explores the complex and difficult task of how to classify fashion materials of animal origin. She emphasizes how the concept of animal “products” and animal “by-products” is potentially confusing: sheep grown for wool will eventually be slaughtered, and the demand for leather sees many slaughterhouses providing primarily leather, rather than meat and then leather as by-product. A true vegan fashion might be one “devoid of any forms of animal involvement”, including animal labor, products, by-products and co-products.
“Climbing the stairs of the Château d’Eau metro station in the heart of Paris’ 10th arrondissement – you encounter… Afro-chic Parisian culture,” including women heading to hair salons “to get their weave done…. Surprisingly this history was overlooked in the Musée des Arts décoratifs’ summer 2023 exhibition Des cheveux et des poils,” writes Nigel Lezama in his thoughtful and well-illustrated review. He goes on to explain how the exhibition explored “hair beauty practices in Europe from the fifteenth century to now,” and was “divided into five thematic spaces: Fashion and Extravagance, Body Hair, Between Nature and Artifice, Hair Professionals and Know-How, and, lastly, Looking at a Hairy Century.” While acknowledging the fascinating material on display, Lezama also points out how problematic it is that the exhibition “normalized whiteness by avoiding questions of race and ethnicity… and … did not effectively engage with the impact of the long cross-cultural experience of European colonialism.” The exhibition-reviews editor Hazel Clark provides us with beautiful photographs that help us re-imagine this event.
Lacey Minot reviews the exhibition “Sur les routes de Samarcande: Merveilles de Soie et d’Or”, also held in Paris at the Institut du Monde Arabe in 2023. These glorious Uzbek garments and carpets were revealed to be often from the hands of male rather than female makers, rather like the church embroidery of the European middle ages. The very popular Suzanis, popular with stylish Europeans since the 1960s, are revealed as regional communication markers connected with their female owner’s identities. Descriptions and photographs provided by the author reveal “vivid colors”, dizzying “hypnotic” and “interlocking” forms. Brilliant felted carpets and ikat robes feed into the formal subjects of avant-garde Soviet paintings, moving from craftworks to inspiration for other cultural forms. The author’s excellent images indicate the elegant dynamism of this Paris show.
Shaun Cole’s second major book on men’s dress, Gay Men’s Fashion Style: Fashion, Dress and Sexuality in the 21st Century is reviewed by Jay McCauley Bowstead. Cole updates his pathbreaking first work Don we Now Our Gay Apparel from 2000 with a series of nearly 80 interviews with mainly British and Australian men from many ethnicities, occupations and cultural backgrounds. The “gay marketplace of desire” is critically analyzed by twinning studies of hegemonic masculinity and the ways in which that is in turn undermined and resisted. The work also makes an important contribution to the study of men’s fashion and aging, a topic very rarely considered in fashion studies.
Genevieve Alva Clutario’s book, Beauty Regimes: A History of Power and Modern Empire in the Philippines, 1898–1941 draws on a variety of sources to deliver “original insights into the way sartorial politics was used by elite Filipino women to empower themselves in the American colonial period and the way these same women also used fashion to express nationalism and Filipino identities,” Mina Roces. In addition, this “unique book” explores “the beauty pageant industry” and the “lucrative” embroidery industry.