[ecrea] International Journal of Fashion Studies 5.2 published

Intellect is delighted to share that the beautifully designed 
International Journal of Fashion Studies 5.2 is available now! For more 
information about the issue, click here >> https://bit.ly/2NJxBes

Special ‘Open Space’ Section: South Asian Fashion

Content

So far so good

Authors: Emanuela Mora And Agnès Rocamora And Paolo Volonté
Page Start: 285

Street-style geographies: Re-mapping the fashion blogipelago

Authors: Brent Luvaas
Page Start: 289

When street-style blogs – amateur web journals featuring photographs of 
stylish pedestrians from around the world – began to pop up on the 
Internet in 2005, they appeared to challenge the established geographic 
hierarchies of the global fashion industry. Shot by fashion outsiders 
with little formal training in photography, they featured a variety of 
people and places far outside the purview of the industry. Drawing in 
millions of readers, including trend forecasters, editors and designers 
from within the industry, blogs seemed to be a democratizing force in 
fashion, drawing attention to once peripheral fashion capitals like 
Helsinki, Cape Town and Buenos Aires, and creating a backdoor into the 
industry for their proprietors. But such a state of affairs could only 
last so long. This article traces the evolution of street-style blogs 
from the vantage points of several prominent street-style bloggers. As 
it does so, it chronicles the geographic struggles operating within the 
fashion ‘blogipelago’; the efforts of bloggers to expand the fashion 
world map; and the efforts of industry insiders to draw attention back 
to the established fashion capitals: New York, London, Milan and Paris.

The dressed body, material and technology: Rethinking the hijab through 
sartorial sociology

Authors: Anna-Mari Almila
Page Start: 309

This article explores the opportunities provided to dress and fashion 
studies by an analytical focus on garments through a number of 
disciplinary and conceptual lenses. Drawing upon sociological sources, 
including Bourdieu’s practice theory and Alfred Gell’s insights of 
human/object agency, as well as anthropology, considerations of material 
technologies and clothing physiology, a framework is developed for 
depicting the many roles that textile materials and garment objects play 
in knowledge-creation, individual experiences of wearing garments and 
the operation of habitus. In my case study analysis of female Islamic 
veiling in Finland, I draw upon both primary data and secondary sources 
that take account of histories – involving individual histories, 
socio-cultural histories, histories of technological and material 
developments and histories of transnational trade routes – and 
materialities, including the physicality of garments, human bodies and 
physical and spatial environments.

Street style, smelling and hanging out: Experimental methods of fashion 
research

Authors: Rosa Crepax
Page Start: 329

Feminist research of fashion, which is committed to understanding 
women’s experience with style in all its multiplicity and richness, is 
open to a variety of new interdisciplinary perspectives. Mirroring the 
open-ended nature of the contemporary world and the vivacious and 
fast-paced quality of the fashion scene, creative, experimental and 
innovative methods of sociocultural research represent a crucial attempt 
in capturing the diversity, variety and exceptionality of feminine 
fashion. This article discusses a methodologically innovative case study 
conducted for my research. It reflects on the feminist approach used in 
the creative experimental exploration of women’s experiences with 
fashion in everyday life, and on the contextual value of combining 
uncommon methods of inquiry such as street-style photography, hanging 
out, sketching and the collection of olfactory perceptions. Discussing 
how this experimental methodology goes beyond both traditional 
interviews and ethnography, the article draws attention to a series of 
questions that arise from its development and application: how does the 
emergence of innovative methods of fashion research respond to 
contemporary changes in the fashion industry? How are these methods 
influenced by the current fashion scene? How are they able to account 
for it? What are the implications of their relationship in terms of 
feminist research practice?

‘It’s like a souvenir of something that was important’: The role of 
nostalgic memorabilia in psychological well-being

Authors: Christoph-Simon Masuch And Kate Hefferon
Page Start: 347

The identity-establishing powers of actively worn fashion, clothing and 
dress have been widely explored by fashion scholars. However, the 
phenomenological aspects of fashion, clothing and dress in general, and 
the identity-establishing role of retained and treasured yet no longer 
or only occasionally worn vestimentary objects, have only been 
marginally explored. Based on data from a constructivist grounded theory 
analysis on the relationship between well-being and clothing practices, 
this study expands upon the findings of one particular theme, Eudaimonic 
Well-Being, and the role of nostalgia and dress memorabilia in identity 
formation. From semi-structured interviews with ten participants, two 
additional subthemes were identified: Reminiscing about Past Selves and 
Preserving Aspects of Self. These themes revealed that dress memorabilia 
served as aides-memoires and were the storage media of complex, 
self-relevant information spurring self-reflection. Furthermore, they 
enabled the positively framed reconsideration of past selves as well as 
the integration of aspects of past selves into the self-concept. 
Findings from this study are contextualized and integrated into existing 
phenomenological works on fashion, clothing and dress. Finally, the 
concept of dress nostalgia is furthermore developed and future routes 
for subsequent research are suggested.

Evolution versus entrenchment: Debating the impact of digitization, 
democratization and diffusion in the global fashion industry

Authors: Taylor Brydges And Brian J. Hracs And Mariangela Lavanga
Page Start: 365

In the report The State of Fashion 2017, written by Business of Fashion 
and the McKinsey Institute (2016), industry executives used three words 
to describe the current state of the fashion industry: uncertain, 
changing and challenging. Indeed, the fashion industry is undergoing 
dramatic transformations, from digitization and the rise of ‘see now, 
buy now’ fashions, to brands redefining the function and timing of 
fashion weeks, and increasing levels of global integration and 
competition (Crewe 2017). As such, the fashion industry has been 
recognized as a valuable lens through which to explore significant and 
ongoing changes to the production, curation and consumption of goods, 
services, and experiences (Brydges et al. 2014; Brydges 2017; D’Ovidio 
2015; Hracs et al. 2013; Lavanga 2018; McRobbie 2016; Pratt et al. 2012).

Drawing inspiration from this stream of scholarship, we organized four 
sessions titled Trending Now: The Changing Geographies of Fashion in the 
Digital Age at the Royal Geographical Society and Institute of British 
Geographers (RGS-IBG) conference in London, 30 August – 1 September 
2017. In these sessions, researchers and practitioners from a wide range 
of locations and disciplines – including fashion studies, media studies, 
cultural economics, business and geography – came together to share 
research related to the structures, labour dynamics, spaces, value 
propositions and practices of the contemporary fashion industry.

While a range of issues were discussed, the sessions were connected by 
an overarching theme. Namely, the extent to which power in the fashion 
industry is expanding or consolidating. While there is a prominent 
discourse that states that structures, systems and spaces within the 
global fashion industry have been (and will continue to be) disrupted by 
new actors, technologies, practices and cities, we collectively 
questioned whether the fashion industry has really entered an era of 
democratization, or if established power structures remain entrenched. 
Through empirical case studies from a variety of geographic contexts – 
from India to Italy – about different actors and activities within the 
industry, each presentation contributed new evidence and perspectives to 
this debate. The discussion below distils some of the key themes that 
emerged.

DKNY – city connection: The impact of New York City on the brand and the 
designer

Authors: Sanem Odabaşi
Page Start: 373

Countries and cities are influential in the formation of brands and the 
identity of designers, as well as being areas that shape creative 
thinking. The relationships that fashion designers have with their 
geographies influence and differentiate their creative power and production.
New York, Tokyo, London, Milan and Paris are renowned as the five 
‘fashion capitals’, and all are known for their distinct fashion style. 
Paris, for instance, is defined through its haute couture while London 
is associated with avant-gardism and quirkiness and ‘New York’ often 
signifies casual ready-towear designs for the urban businesswoman 
(Loschek 2009; Rocamora 2009). The nature of a place affects what 
products can actually proliferate, and since places do differ from one 
another, so too do the products differ depending on where they are 
produced (Molotch 2003: 157).

Introduction: Continuing the dialogue on South Asian fashion studies

Authors: Lipi Begum
Page Start: 383

Handcraft as luxury in Bangladesh: Weaving jamdani in the twenty-first 
century

Authors: Sonia Ashmore
Page Start: 389

The practice of making things by hand in the Indian subcontinent is 
centuries old. Many, if not most, artefacts were handcrafted until the 
late twentieth century and some are still. From handwoven textiles made 
from handspun and hand-dyed cloth, printed and embroidered by hand; to 
brass water pots beaten out by hand, making a deafening noise, and 
handloom carpet weaving in the Indian town of Mirzapur, Uttar Pradesh. 
Many of these crafts and their associated livelihoods are now almost 
extinct or under threat (Radzan 2007). By the late seventeenth century, 
Bengal in Western India had become the centre of a worldwide silk and 
cotton textile trade, notably in the largescale hand production of 
muslin and jamdani – exceptionally fine plain and figured woven cottons 
made specifically in the area around Dhaka, capital of independent 
Bangladesh since 1971. In the late eighteenth century, Dhaka, then part 
of Bengal, also had royal workshops devoted to producing fine cotton 
muslins exclusively for royal consumption (Latif 1997: 43). A length of 
Mulmul khas, or ‘special muslin’, measuring 22 yards by one yard (20.11 
× 0.91 metres) took up to six months to weave. It could only be made 
when the air was moist enough to prevent the fibres from breaking. With 
a drastic decline in fine handweaving, however, the exceptional textile 
traditions of Bangladesh today are precarious. This article focuses on 
the situation of jamdani weaving, indigenous to a specific geographical 
area now in Bangladesh; it argues that the survival of traditional 
muslin and jamdani making has to be considered not as a ‘folk craft’, 
but as the production of the refined luxury fabric it was historically. 
While there are other traditional textiles being made by hand in 
Bangladesh today, this short article will focus on the handweaving of 
jamdani.

Sartorially weaving their way through bhodrota (respectability): 
Georgette sarees, bangles and selling sex in a Kolkata neighbourhood

Authors: Mirna Guha
Page Start: 399

In this excerpt, I unpack my field notes from the day to reveal the ways 
in which female sex workers in Kalighat, a red-light area embedded in a 
middleclass neighbourhood in Kolkata, West Bengal, India, negotiate 
middle-class norms of respectability and female propriety. Specifically, 
I focus on how the women navigate and manipulate sartorial norms which 
are imposed on them and their work to their social and economic advantage.

Visual fashion landscapes: Gender and class in Lollywood billboard 
advertising

Authors: Hena Ali
Page Start: 407

Book Reviews

Authors: Dina Khalifa And Margarita Estévez-Saá
Page Start: 417

Luxury Indian Fashion: A Social Critique, Tereza Kuldova (2016, first 
edition)
Fashion, Dress and Identity in South Asian Diaspora Narratives: From the 
Eighteenth Century to Monica Ali, Noemi Pereira-Ares (2018, FIRST EDITION)
---------------
The COMMLIST
---------------
This mailing list is a free service offered by Nico Carpentier. Please
use it responsibly and wisely.
--
To subscribe or unsubscribe, please visit http://commlist.org/
--
Before sending a posting request, please always read the guidelines at
http://commlist.org/
--
To contact the mailing list manager:
Email: (nico.carpentier /at/ vub.ac.be)
URL: http://nicocarpentier.net
---------------