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- Volume 4, Issue 3, 2017
Fashion, Style & Popular Culture - Volume 4, Issue 3, 2017
Volume 4, Issue 3, 2017
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Ethical and sustainable luxury: The paradox of consumerism and caring
More LessAbstractThe exposure of the dark underbelly of fashion sheds light on the ethical dilemma of manufacturing and consuming apparel. Tragedy caused by deplorable working conditions and human exploitation is as much a part of the fashion landscape as textiles and garments. What lessons were learned after the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist fire that killed 145 workers in New York City? Not many, based on the 2013 Rana Plaza collapse where 1130 factory workers died. Over hundred years after the Triangle fire the fashion industry’s failure to provide measures ensuring the safety and ethical treatment of workers continues. The environment also suffers from the absence of sustainable and renewable resources in the production of fashion. 20 per cent of global industrial water pollution comes from the treatment and dyeing of textiles. Water usage, the destruction of the rain forests, bulging landfills and toxic chemicals are incalculably detrimental to the environment and yet the fashion industry lags woefully behind in creating sustainable solutions. The root of the fashion industry’s ethical problems is consumer demand for more goods at every price point, including the luxury sector. Yet, many consumers believe they purchase fashion responsibly. In the 2015 The Ethical Consumer Report, 70 per cent of consumers stated their purchasing decisions are influenced by ethics. However, a mere 23 per cent are ‘often or always’ influenced by ethics. ‘It is well known that consumers saying they want ethical products does not necessarily translate into greater sales’. Therein lies the rub; consumers say they care, but they do not purchase like they care. The paradox of consumerism and caring is real.
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Still putting on the style: Older men’s ‘fashion narratives’
By Jackie GoodeAbstractIn a context in which men’s relationships to dress, fashion and style is only just beginning to receive serious academic attention, this article presents the findings of a small-scale qualitative study in which older men’s ‘fashion narratives’ were collected via in-depth interviews and photographs. It is sometimes assumed that older people are uninterested in engaging with fashion and that this is especially so for men. Twigg, for example, suggests that what is more significant for older men is the attraction not of new, but old clothes and of established forms of dress that leaves the individual free not to engage with the realm of consumption; and that such disengagement explains a conservatism underlying the dress of the old, where the changes of the fashion cycle have ceased to exert their cultural pull. The participants in this study contravened this assumption. Their stories reveal the intimate relationship between fashion, style and the construction of identity, in particular, components of individualism which, despite a narrower clothing ‘menu’ than that available to women, is carried through into older age.
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Politicizing the site of fashion: Conversations with designing women in Dhaka
More LessAbstractFashion and consumption are culturally coded ways through which systems of class reinscribe and reproduce legitimacy by articulating, regulating and monitoring hierarchies of culture, class and consumption. Fashion and clothing are not only about presentation, they are also the means by which identities and power relations are produced and contested in local-translocal-global spaces. In this article based on ethnographic research, I discuss how fashion entrepreneurs in Dhaka, Bangladesh, are engaged in (re)articulating social and class relations through fashion. They do this by claiming a local and authentic fashion against a hybridized transnational trend. At the same time, dominant modes of fashion are challenged and reappropriated, giving way to negotiations in power dynamics. In this site of cultural production fashion is a fluid system where agency and subjectivity are actively negotiated.
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‘Black Duck Feathers’ or becoming-perfect
More LessAbstractThis article offers a study of one singular dress created by fashion designer Lee Alexander McQueen, namely, the ‘Black Duck Feathers’. Consisting of preternaturally oversized shoulders and hips and of black feathers covering the entire figure, this specific dress emblematically served to turn an indistinct female body into a romantic, yet melancholic black bird of prey. While ‘Black Duck Feathers’ has been interpreted within the frame of Romanticism in exhibitions at the MET and the V&A, this article makes the dress the starting point of a dialogue between Alexander McQueen’s creative process and Deleuze and Guattari’s complex philosophical theory of becoming, which they develop in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. The aim is to highlight the possibility for an artefact to be a tool for illuminating philosophical theories and concepts and to be the trigger of innumerable and complex considerations. This is in contrast to the way in which critical theory is traditionally used, which is to say, to analyse phenomena, cultural processes and expressions of material culture. The choice of making theory the real object of study in this article is inspired by the very idea of metamorphosis and openness of the body that shapes ‘Black Duck Feathers’ and that seems to characterize Alexander McQueen’s poetics. Metamorphosis of the body, of fields and of theories can be used to study fashion, and is understood here as a way of playing on the edge and among frontiers and as a desire and a need to exceed their borders.
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Dressing for the Internet: A study of female self-presentation via dress on Instagram
Authors: Claire Shumaker, David Loranger and Amy DorieAbstractSocial networking sites (SNS) and social media (SM) have evolved into important methods of communication in modern society. A number of SM platforms are imageoriented sites such as Instagram, which provide tools to edit and post images of one’s self in place of verbal communication. These tools are especially critical in the lives of younger generations who have been reared on technology. SM provides the ability to curate one’s image and receive feedback in an almost instantaneous and customizable manner. In this two-stage, qualitative grounded theory study, a stage-one initial survey (n=208) indicated that nearly half of the respondents used dress as a communication tool when posting images on SM and that Instagram was the most used SNS. In stage-two, in-depth interviews were conducted with a sample of (n=15) undergraduate students to investigate participants’ usage of Instagram, along with their self-proclaimed use of dress as a method of communication through images posted on the SNS. Results indicated that participants used dress as a tool to communicate aspects of experiences, feelings, lifestyles and beliefs when posting images on Instagram.
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Dress and the Public, Private and Secret Self Model during emerging adulthood
Authors: Kimberly A. Miller-Spillman, Min-Young Lee, Nicole Huffman, Jeong-Ju Yoo and Yang-Jin KimAbstractThis research is a new application of Dress and the Public, Private and Secret Self (PPSS) Model. From a symbolic interaction theory approach, dress and parts of the self were developed in 1981 and expanded in 1994 from three categories to nine. According to the literature, adolescents use dress in two cells of the PPSS Model while older adults use dress in nine cells. To find out whether there is a different stage of dress between adolescence and older adulthood, this research uses the concept of emerging adulthood (18–25 years) to test the use of dress and levels of the self. A quantitative scale was developed for this purpose since none were found in the literature. A total of 351 questionnaires were analysed and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) ensured the validity of the measure. Data analyses included test of within-subjects effects, a paired sample t-test, mean differences and an independent t-test. Findings from 261 surveys from respondents 18–25 years of age indicate that this sample experienced six cells at an average to above-average level of experience, supporting the hypothesis that differences among age groups on dress and PPSS could result from a maturation process. Implications are discussed for further research.
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Dress, body and experiences of victimization
Authors: Andrew Reilly and Kim K. P. JohnsonAbstractOur research purpose was to uncover perceived relationships between aspects of appearance (i.e., body, dress) and experiences of any form of victimization from the perspective of survivors. We addressed three research questions: (1) what connection, if any, did survivors draw between their appearance and their experience of victimization?; (2) what changes, if any, did survivors make to their appearance after their experience(s)?; and (3) what advice, if any, would survivors give to others on appearance as a result of their experience? Five women and three men completed interviews. Participants identified appearance cues as a stimulus evoking others’ behaviours towards them. Both general appearance attributes and specific attributes were credited with eliciting negative behaviours. Experiences with victimization often occurred when the individual was attempting to move into a culture that was new to them. Most participants altered or made adjustments to their appearance as a result of their victimization experience.
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Fashion and Appropriation
Authors: Denise Nicole Green and Susan B. Kaiser
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