We’ve also gotten similar feedback from other people, at least in the New York community, who have said that that before we started doing things like our social events, everybody really felt like they were on their own. And I think that just speaks to the nature of the academic climate right now.
On the journal’s 2016 relaunch:
LAURA:
Well, Kim [Jenkins] gets a lot of credit for that.
LAUREN:
Yeah, we’d been doing things here and there. We’d been having conversations since we left the Master’s about our second issue [of FSJ]. And then we had our first “Fashion and Spinach” dinner, in the spring in 2015. I just had a Facebook notification that popped up and reminded me of that event. We’d been moving in the direction of doing social programming, and I think there’d been some chitchat about getting the publishing going again. But it was Kim who approached us last summer and said that she was interested in starting up FSJ again and had this idea to make it more widely accessible, changing the tone a bit. And I think that we were all very down with that idea.
LAURA:
Yeah, she gave us a proposal that had all kinds of elements to it. Not all of which we’ve been able to execute, but the publishing side was definitely her vision that we all got on board with. The idea was that there would still be some academic content, traditional academic content, and that’s become our “Essays” section, where there would still be rigorous citations and all that. But then it would be mixed with the kind of writing that could be seen in fashion blogs or magazines; it would still have a critical tone, still be on a bed of real theory, but the tone and the writing style would be more internet-ish, rather than journal-ish. It all came naturally from this idea of marrying history and theory with more fun; fun content.
ILLUSTRATION 3
Illustration from The Fashion Studies Journal. Kelly Abeln, Beauty Salon, 2016, illustration. “Why a Hijabi CoverGirl Matters to Me,” Adelle McElveen, The Fashion Studies Journal (9 December 2016), www.fashionstudiesjournal.org/commentary/2016/12/9/curly-hair.
On how the journal and its mission has changed since its inception:
LAURA:
lauren:
It’s also become international. Which has been great.
I don’t know that we’ve moved away from academia at all. I think that, to an extent, we’ve come to embrace it a bit more. I feel like when we relaunched it we were trying to move away from it, but then the response has been so enthusiastic from people within our community that we’ve rolled with that.