Volume 1, Issue 1

We are two scholars who locate ourselves within Fashion Studies and outside of it. In this paper, we draw from our professional experiences and research programs to argue that Fashion Studies should be both a stand-alone and a cross-disciplinary field. Fashion provides a lens to understand the social, visual, and material worlds, while Fashion Studies fosters community among scholars who are deeply “invested” in the study of dress, adornment, and the body. […]

In early twentieth-century Puerto Rico — a society in transition — Puerto Ricans were confronted with a modernity not totally under their control, but which they both desired and feared. In this “colonial modernity” Puerto Ricans debated its impact, especially on gender notions, through fashion texts and images. Most of those revolved around women, their behavior, and even their physical body. However, as this paper argues, men in early twentieth-century Puerto Rico were interpellated by fashion discourses, too. […]

Since its inception fashion studies has occupied niche fields of enquiry that have focussed largely on Eurocentric paradigms of discussion around the engagement with fashion objects and the development and display of status and identity. Pockets of enquiry have focussed on areas outside of the Eurocentric western cannon but largely remain apart from what is considered established fashion studies. […]

In Illness as Metaphor, Susan Sontag argued that a new mobility in the eighteenth century unsettled established ideas of worth and station. These were reasserted “through new notions about clothes (‘fashions’) and new attitudes about illness. Both clothes (the outer garment of the body) and illness (a kind of interior décor of the body) became tropes for new attitudes toward the self.” Fashion studies and the history of medicine have productively investigated the relationship between clothes and illness, respectively, to the self. […]

A(R)MADAS (a Spanish pun for beloved and armed) was performed by the Chilean collective entitled Malvestidas on December 19, 2021 in commemoration of the National Day Against Femicide. In Chile, and Latin America in general, over the course of the last two years, the COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically exposed gender inequalities and gender-based social emergencies. This is due to the increase in violence against women, children, migrants, and gender-sex dissidents. […]

The Between Histories Archive is a digital archive that collects, preserves, and shares South African pop culture artifacts. The project was born out of the need to acknowledge the study of popular culture from an African perspective, tracing South African cultural history through the sentimentality of public and popular culture. The archive mainly uses desktop research, the collection of online artifacts from existing, primary sources that are catalogued according to their position as “pop cultural”: music videos, television programs, reading material, fashion, photography, etc. […]

For writers from Charles Baudelaire to Giles Lipovetsky, notions of ephemerality, of an ever-increasing pace of change, have linked the concept of fashion with that of modernity. Fashion is doubly temporal, defined equally by fleeting shifts in visual and material manifestations and by its constitution of a momentary now. Using late eighteenth and early nineteenth century treatments of ancient Mediterranean art as a lens to consider the modes in which early fashion theorists encountered Greek and Roman dress practices, this contribution advocates for a paradigmatic shift, one that acknowledges the artificiality of temporal boundaries in order to reframe the terminologies applied to dress practices across the ancient Mediterranean. […]

The archivists and collection managers who work in fashion collections may stay quietly behind the scenes, and yet their dedication to preservation and access is crucial for the public and for scholars and artists seeking knowledge and inspiration. This interview explores the rich collaboration that occurred from 2018 to 2019 at The Metropolitan Museum of Art between Ellen Sampson, a visual artist and material culture scholar, and Elizabeth Randolph, at the time the collections manager of The Costume Institute. […]

In this conversation, Liudmila Aliabieva, Head of the PhD Programme in Art and Design at the Higher School of Economics Research University, Moscow and Editor-in-Chief of Russian Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture and Hazel Clark, Professor of Design Studies and Fashion Studies, and current director of the MA Fashion Studies program at Parsons School of Design, The New School, New York discuss their individual career trajectories as authors, editors, educators, and theorists to address key moments in the development of the fashion studies discipline from their respective geographic locations. […]

The professional conservation of fashion is a relatively recent global phenomenon, emerging over the past half century. A vibrant sub-discipline of textile conservation, fashion conservation fluidly straddles dress chemistry, museology, fashion history, and contemporary fashion practice, and its techniques vary depending on cultural origins and training of the practitioner. This interview between two conservators, Deepshikha Kalsi, who owns the art conservation consultancy Textile Conservation Studio, and Sarah Scaturro, Eric and Jane Nord Chief Conservator at the Cleveland Museum of Art, locates the preservation of dress and textiles in India within the country’s own unique textile and museological traditions. […]