Letter from the Editors

Where does Fashion Studies begin and where does it end? How can one map the boundaries of fashion research, which like fashion itself, are always changing, merging, appearing, and disappearing?

We started from a simple premise of interrogating its borders — we wanted to know what methods and subjects constituted “in” Fashion Studies and what was “out” — fundamentally asking who determines these boundaries and why. The seeds of this issue started in 2019, in a landscape unaltered by Covid, and our study of this concern first took form at the February 2020 College Arts Association meeting in Chicago, with the pandemic already on the horizon. This panel considered critical modes for engaging with Fashion Studies as well as exemplary case studies for how these approaches have been applied — both from inside, outside and across its traditional disciplinary arenas such as anthropology, sociology, visual culture studies, among others — to challenge pervasive misconceptions of its tautly circumscribed subject area. We sought to wrest the restrictive prerequisites for being a “fashion scholar” away from what defines Fashion Studies’ scholarship by opening up the very meaning of both.

From the panel’s appearance on the eve of a global pandemic, this issue eked into existence in fits and starts, itself shapeshifting through regional lock-downs, institutional closures, and as authors dropped out and joined in as the precarity of living through a pandemic while working in (and around) an already unstable field intensified.[1]  For us, the shapeshifting form of this issue exemplified the leaky and porous edges of the field itself. Any project that considers thresholds, boundaries, and borders — no matter how permeable — necessarily must contend with the innate geographic and cultural subjectivity of its participants. Indeed, the process of doing this issue maps onto the instability of Fashion Studies, how it morphs with every cultural convulsion and expands with every new piece of scholarship.

We each have had our own strained experiences navigating the boundaries of the field, sometimes bumping into its barriers. As scholars studying fashion from perspectives that often reach far beyond if not outside of its traditional contexts of making, consuming, and wearing dress, there have been times when people questioned our own disciplinary location, legitimacy, or legibility within the field. We struggled to reconcile siloed professional positions across museums and the academy, “fringing” the study of fashion with our own efforts to advance new research and, each in our own way, move the field forward. We have encountered institutional structures that surveil transgressive border crossing by limiting options and maintaining narrow definitions. The tensions inherent in creating and policing boundaries have emerged concurrently with Fashion Studies’ own coherence. As Fashion Studies came into being, the borders kept reappearing, redrawn with every contribution and with this, new anxieties about the definition of the field emerged. The same is still happening today.

Instead of focusing on these tensions, however, we instead aim to highlight with this issue the myriad ways in which scholars, practitioners, and activists use fashion to push at the edges of the field, perpetually reframing its outer limits, contributing to its growth and expansion, and redefining what it means to be “in” Fashion (Studies). This issue could have had any number of manifestations, as we recognize the futility of seeking an answer to the question: What is Fashion Studies today? Rather than try to answer such a wide remit with a holistic, yet impossible, undertaking, we instead looked for practitioners who are contributing to the field in their own unique way and place. We acknowledge that no single journal issue can comprehensively cover everything, so instead of being exhaustive, we explore where Fashion Studies has been historically located while importantly pointing towards its future by signaling fashion’s capacious ability to incorporate. We recognize that glaring omissions, however, remain — for example, an address of Indigenous fashion perspectives is notably absent here, and we recommend that readers visit the Fashion Studies’ Special Issue “Fashioning Resurgence: Indigenous Fashion Design and Decolonization on Turtle Island” for a trenchant examination of the cultural and political stakes of these practices. Likewise, advancements in fashion and sustainability scholarship will be explored in an upcoming Fashion Studies Special Issue.[2] Yet, even with noted gaps, our Special Issue holds value by offering a snapshot of current fashion and fashion-adjacent scholarship while cumulatively suggesting the richness of approaches that Fashion Studies can absorb and transmutate.

Exploiting the ways in which fashion simultaneously indexes local and global positionalities, personal and collective narratives, and esoteric and popular expressions, together the contributions collected in this issue highlight Fashion Studies’ expansive potential to carve new ground and reveal methodologies that are relevant, if not urgent, for reframing and reimagining fashion research and its practices. It is no coincidence that the perceptive essay by Fashion Studies’ founders and editors Alison Matthews David and Ben Barry opens this collection. They propose a manifesto for an expansion of the Fashion Studies field that identifies its profound potential to be both “bordered and borderless.” Rather than see this as a paradox, they propose this concurrent framework as a method for researching against the silos and academic rigidity that so often undermine the production of new scholarship, methodologies, and modes of making. Foregrounding these issues, the conversation between Professor and Editor of Russian Fashion Theory Liudmila Aliabieva and Hazel Clark, Professor of Design Studies and Fashion Studies, Parsons the New School of Design, New York, reflect on the challenges of pioneering a new arena of humanities research and developing critical and transdisciplinary praxes for designers. From the impact of globalization in the 1990s to the critical importance of decolonial approaches today, Clark and Aliabieva thoughtfully discuss the present state of Fashion Studies, however elusive determining its borders may be. 

Teleica Kirkland, Director of the Costume Institute of the African Diaspora (CIAD), charts one way forward. Recent work by Sarah Cheang and Erika de Greef, among others, on postcolonial approaches to fashion and dress scholarship has recognized the deeply entrenched Eurocentric foundations to both fashion theory and its applications that heretofore have defined the discipline. In “Methodologies for the Creolization of Fashion Studies,” Kirkland builds upon the work of Carol Tulloch to keenly contribute to this long-overdue conversation, proposing a methodological treatise that interrogates the dress and sartorial practices of the African Diaspora. Kirkland suggests confronting the harmful, reductive categorizations pervasive in the field by instead amplifying the diversity of one’s lived experience. The intercultural and transnational entanglements endemic to Diasporic dress are similarly explored in Antonio Hernández-Matos’s essay “‘Hombres sí/Hombres nó:’ Fashioning Masculinity in Early Twentieth Century Puerto Rico.”  Hernández-Matos closely examines the cultural signifiers of “colonial modernity” in Puerto Rico to reveal the “conflicting masculinities” at work in early twentieth-century periodicals. Likewise, Christopher Rudeen’s contribution sits at the intersection of fashion history and the history of medicine as it considers the therapeutic potentials of clothing. He examines dress as a pathology and panacea through three case studies problematizing binaries such as class and gender. Rudeen’s cross-field positionality mirrors classicist Neville McFerrin’s compelling analysis of Ancient Greek and Roman dress practices to reveal an understanding of fashion (rather than dress or costume) as determined by premodern shifts in materiality rather than late eighteenth-century aesthetic developments as it has been  historically defined.

While standalone essays offer the opportunity to probe a topic in depth, we wanted to center the actual voices of practitioners themselves. We commissioned interviews to highlight the experiences of those who have helped create the field, and those who mine it. The conversation between Aliabeva and Clark provides a reflective and wide-ranging foundation for the more discrete subjects addressed in the three discussions that follow. While we don’t explore the museology of fashion explicitly, the curatorial impulse arises in several contributions through Sungano Kanjere’s digital-born archive, Elizabeth Randolph’s and Ellen Sampson’s archival explorations, and Deepshikha Kalsi’s efforts to establish a professional level of conservation for textile and fashion collections in India. From intimate inquiries into the material resonance of a sartorial object to an analysis of South African visual culture, these conversations further expand the disciplinary scope of Fashion Studies by decentering approaches away from more traditional modalities to instead explore a range of liminal subject areas that thus far have laid fallow. Kanjere and Linden J. Hill discuss the origins of the Kanjere’s “Between Histories Archive” and explore the capacity of sentimentality to register Post-Apartheid fashion in South Africa and recast these cultural artifacts to challenge expected modes of knowledge production and circulation. Elizabeth Randolph and Ellen Sampson consider their shared experiences and close collaboration during Sampson’s 2018–2019 research fellowship at The Met’s Costume Institute for her “Afterlives of Clothes” project. At the time, Randolph served as the collections manager for this preeminent fashion collection, and their conversation foregrounds the densely entwined forms of labor intrinsic to archival research and upkeep while also candidly exploring the potent affects of nostalgia and loss that inform this work and the archival space itself. The interview by guest editor Sarah Scaturro with Deepshikha Kalsi tracks Kalsi’s effort to professionalize the preservation of textiles — a material which, in India, is not distinguishable from fashion, thus undermining the fashion/textile binary so often deployed in western academia. Significantly, Kalsi situates textile conservation within historical practices foregrounding sustainability. Beyond working with collections, Kalsi prioritizes outreach with makers, often fashion designers, to ensure the longevity and celebration of Indian textiles and the transfer of artistic knowledge systems.

Our last addition to this special issue features the Colectivo Malvestidas (Poorly Dressed Collective), founded in 2016 by Chilean artists/activists, including Tamara Poblete and Loreto Martínez, who explore critical practices in fashion, clothing, and the body. Their contribution documents the collective’s performative action “A(R)MADAS” (a Spanish pun for beloved and armed) held on December 19, 2021 in commemoration of the National Day Against Femicide in Chile. Complementing the urgency of their “A(R)MADAS” portfolio and highlighting the political stakes of their work, we are pleased to publish the Collective’s manifesto for the first time. We encourage you to consider how their manifesto might be relevant to your own dress-centered practice and studies.

We’ve gathered together these contributions to highlight the advantages of a digital journal, offering the authors flexibility in length and format, whether their contribution be a long-form essay, artistic manifesto, interview, or digital archive. We are immensely grateful to the Fashion Studies team for believing in our vision and supporting this work through the fluctuating uncertainties and challenges caused by a global pandemic. We also would like to thank the many peer reviewers who generously devoted their time and expertise in engaging with the authors’ works. And lastly, to all the authors of this issue who have patiently waited for their work to be published, without you, this field would be so much poorer.

Sarah Scaturro and Ann Marguerite Tartsinis

Special Issue Co-Editors

[1] For example, the Fashion Studies Journal released a timely special issue on fashion and mental health that explored, in part, the worsening of the mental health crisis because of the pandemic. In this issue, Sarah C. Byrd’s essay “The Case for Not Making it Work” crucially addresses the confluence of academic gatekeeping, underpaid/undervalued labor, and mental health crises during the pandemic (https://www.fashionstudiesjournal.org/fashion-mental-health-issue).

[2] “Fashioning Sustainment” is forthcoming in Winter 2024 and will be co-edited by Dr. Annebella Pollen and Dr Alex Esculapio.