[Commlist] CFP: New Reflections on Fashioning Identities: Lifestyle, Emotions and Celebrity Culture

Call for Papers :New Reflections on Fashioning Identities: Lifestyle, 
Emotions and Celebrity Culture 14 June 2019


University of Roehampton - London, UK.

A one-day symposium supported by the Centre for Research in Film and 
Audio-Visual Cultures (CRFAC), in association with the Fashion, Costume 
and Visual Cultures (FCVC) Network. Organised by Dr T. Thomadaki


Keynote Speakers

Dr Shaun Cole Associate Professor of Fashion at Winchester School of 
Art, University of Southampton.

Gok Wan Multi-award-winning UK presenter, fashion expert and on-screen 
consultant.

Abstracts of up to 300 words along with a short biography and contact 
details, should be submitted to Dr Theodora Thomadaki at 
(theodora.thomadaki /at/ roehampton.ac.uk) by February 15th, 2019. 
Notifications will be sent out in early March 2019.

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Topics may include, but are not limited to:
 Makeover culture and self-improvement
 Reality TV and ordinary celebrities
 Celebrity, fashion and branding
 TV, transformation and lifestyle culture
 Fashion, sexuality and gender performativity
 Ordinary clothes and fashion objects
 Social media, editing and consumption practices
 Clothes, skin and emotional expression
 [Post]feminism, beauty and the body
 Psychoanalysis and popular culture.


Presenters at the symposium will be encouraged to develop their papers 
for publication in a number of Intellect journals, including: Film, 
Fashion and Consumption, Clothing Cultures, Critical Studies in Men’s 
Fashion, and Queer Studies in Media and Popular Culture. A full list of 
Intellect journals is available at: 
https://www.intellectbooks.co.uk/journals/index/


SUMMARY


Gok Wan’s award winning series How To Look Good Naked (Channel 4, 
2006-2010) vividly revolutionised the popular terrains of the makeover 
genre. It pushed the cultural boundaries of the traditional makeover 
format by facilitating an emotionally rich transformational experience 
where female participants reflectively engaged with hidden and often 
unexplored aspects of their inner subjective experiences. For Gok Wan, 
the way in which ordinary women emotionally perceived their own body 
imperfections, as well as how they undervalued their self-worth, is what 
the programme considered important and in need of modifying. Thomadaki 
(2017) argues that the appearance of the specific format facilitated by 
Gok Wan in How To Look Good Naked signals an important shift in the 
makeover frame towards a discourse of the therapeutic, chiming with what 
has widely been hailed as a particularly ‘therapeutic’ moment in popular 
culture (Richards, 2004; Richards and Brown, 2011, 2002; Bainbridge and 
Yates, 2012, 2014; Yates, 2013). Gok Wan’s How To Look Good Naked’s use 
of fashion/stylistic skills and practices revealed the expert’s capacity 
to generate creative opportunities, where aspects of the self can emerge 
through the playful engagement with fashion and makeover objects related 
to the participant’s inner self-experience. The effectiveness of the How 
To Look Good Naked practice launched Gok Wan as a powerful celebrity and 
on-screen fashion consultant who has been recognised for his continued 
effort in raising emotional awareness for current feminine body related 
issues and concerns, as well as for introducing ‘feel good’ practices 
that offer opportunities for self-reflection and self-growth. His 
empathetic capacity to reflectively engage with his female subjects 
revealed an important evolution in the makeover frame, where the 
omnipotent figure of the expert as objective judge was culturally undone.
Ten years on, the Gok Wan phenomenon can be seen to have played a key 
role in shaping what we understand as ‘therapeutic’ in popular British 
lifestyle media and makeover culture. This symposium aims to bring 
together established, early career and emerging scholars and 
practitioners working in fashion, promotional culture, celebrity studies 
and lifestyle media to explore current debates on makeover, fashion and 
lifestyle practices that enable us to bridge the outer and inner word as 
means of (re)exploring, (re)discovering, and reflecting on the body, 
self, sexuality and identity.

Anita Biressi  PhD FRSA FHEA

Professor of Media and Society

Chair MeCCSA

Dept. Media, Culture and Language

Southlands College

Room QB 026
University of Roehampton | London | SW15 5SL
(a.biressi /at/ roehampton.ac.uk) <mailto:(a.biressi /at/ roehampton.ac.uk)> | 
www.roehampton.ac.uk <http://www.roehampton.ac.uk/>
Tel: +44 (0) 20 8392 3396


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