The fashion film has a history dating back to the first years of moving pictures. Alice Noris and Lorenzo Cantoni in “‘The Good Italian’: Fashion Films as Lifestyle Manifestos. A study based on thematic analysis and digital analytics” use a case-study approach to analyze a three-part fashion film created for the Caruso menswear company, established in 1958. Going beyond discourse analysis and data analytics, they also interview the former CEO, Umberto Angeloni, to “go inside” the company as it were, in order to understand the development, purpose and function of the films. “Fashion movies,” they argue, can “break down cultural barriers” and create a product with a “cultural resilience” that continues to be watched well after the fashion season has passed.
As cinema and digital technologies intertwine, so do shifts in design, social, cultural and ecological thinking. Rachael Cassar proposes a new way of thinking through upcycling in her “Upcycling with Material Debris: Nurturing the Creative Process through Responsible Handling of Waste Materials.” Upcycling, she argues, must necessarily produce waste, and this “debris” can be reused in new and creative ways. Using practice-based and autoethnographic methods, Cassar performs various operations on an historical archive (1870–1938) of clothing fragments and accessories that had been gifted to her. Working with the refuse of the wardrobe of Australian woman Mary Ellen Tuite, Cassar was prompted to think through themes including the relic, the souvenir, the archive and the past. This upcycler’s “subjective experience is entangled in understanding an object’s materiality which permits dual meanings and significances.” Cassar builds on her earlier career as a designer to actors and personalities including Ruby Rose and Tyra Banks, bringing to Fashion Theory a deep academic reflection on working with debris as “a space for innovation.”
“Fabrics of Memory” by the artist and writer Emma Windsor-Liscombe explores connections between clothing, trauma, and memory. It is a personal narrative that focuses on a sweater donated by the Red Cross to a young Canadian, Leonard McCann (1927–2015), who was interred in a Japanese camp in the Philippines during World War II. Windsor-Liscombe analyses the story of McCann’s sweater (now in a house museum) with reference to its potential historical and psychological significance.
“@JessicaOutOfTheCloset: Intersections of Vintage Styles, Gender, Queerness, and Disability in Online Spaces” is a very interesting article about a British internet personality, Jessica Kellgren-Fozard, whose online content often focuses on vintage dressing. The authors, Joshua D. Simon and Kelly L. Reddy-Best, draw on feminist queer crip theory and the (k)notty model in fashion theory to guide their interpretation of how people with intersectionally marginalized identities negotiate issues of dress and style.
Our Exhibition Reviews record and also extend the intellectual life of the museum exhibition format. Anya Kurennaya reviews “Food and Fashion,” exhibited at The Museum at FIT, New York, September 13, 2023–November 26, 2023. Curated by Melissa Marra-Alvarez and Elizabeth Way, the exhibition proposed that fashion and culinary life could be connected via popular and high culture formats, links between advertising and fashion, connections between food and fashion as “forms of soft power and symbols of prestige,” as well as “fantasies of plenty and critiques of decadence.” The 1930s Surrealist interest in food as “a source of both celebration and consternation” continues to reverberate in recent and contemporary fashion, examples including Issey Miyake’s Pleats Please bento box and Leean Huang’s “Banquet Dinner coat.” The post-war couture techniques used by designers such as Jean Dessès are imaginatively compared by the curators to pâtisserie, and the growing use of vegan materials signals another compelling cultural connection between fashion and food.
In addition to our regular sections on book and exhibition reviews, we are pleased to present a new section on archives. Elaine Evans and Kevin Almond describe the Yorkshire Fashion Archive, founded in 1999 at the University of Leeds. Like many dress collections, it is “rooted in regionalism” and local history, focusing on “fashionable” yet “everyday dress” that was “bought, made, and worn” in Yorkshire. As a result, the “provenance of individual artifacts” is often known. The fashion design program at the university organizes exhibitions, but the main objective of the archive is “to support teaching and research in the School of Design.” It has also been “examined as a case study… in a variety of publications”—including, now, Fashion Theory.
Madeleine C. Seys, a Victorian literature scholar who also works on dress, reviews Margaret Maynard’s latest book “Dressed in Time: A World View.” Maynard, who pioneered the university study of dress in Australia from the 1970s, crafts a knowing and wide-ranging elegy to the relationship of fashion and time. Casting her gaze across chronologies and cultures from the Ancient World to the Apple Watch, Maynard “argues that scholarly and curatorial practices of identifying and dating garments as typical of a style and/or period, has produced a false narrative of the social practices and lived experiences of clothing.” This provocative book connects itself with the “material turn” found also in the work of Jules Prown and Lou Taylor, and yet, “despite being object, rather than theory, oriented … makes an important intervention into theories of the value and significance of sartorial artifacts over time.” As Seys concludes, “it’s time to think about dress in this way.”
Valerie Steele and Peter McNeil