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- Volume 1, Issue 2, 2014
International Journal of Fashion Studies - Volume 1, Issue 2, 2014
Volume 1, Issue 2, 2014
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On the issue of sustainability in fashion studies
Authors: Emanuela Mora, Agnès Rocamora and Paolo VolontéAbstractIn recent years sustainability has been at the forefront of some of the most stimulating reflections on fashion. It is also the main topic of the second issue of the International Journal of Fashion Studies. This had not been planned and is the fortuitous result of the peer reviewing process. But this coincidence is symptomatic of a significant trend in contemporary fashion studies. This editorial gives an overview of the current state of studies on sustainable fashion and identifies some of the most pressing issues.
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Professional women’s thoughts about sustainable clothing: Eco-fashion goes business?
More LessAbstractThis article discusses the significant role of sustainable consumption in postmodern societies and the apparent ‘sustainable fashion gap’ in the priorities of consumers who are interested in sustainable issues in Germany. Drawing on the opinions of female academic employees from universities and managers from the private sector, this article will outline why consumers in Germany do not award sustainable clothing the same status as products in use in daily life in terms of sustainability. In the academic debate a negative image of eco-clothing, which developed in the 1970s, is considered to be responsible for such situation. The previous eco-clothing won a reputation by consumers as unfashionable and an ‘eco-frumpy-look’ and influenced its acceptance negatively. In spite of ecological textile innovations and the expansion of clothing ranges, consumption of sustainable clothing has not generally improved in recent decades. The survey fleshes out that the current low acceptance of sustainable fashion is not due to a supposedly negative image of ecological fashion but because of structural problems within the production and consumption processes as well as an inadequate product range which does not take gender constructs into account. The old clichés of eco-clothing no longer apply, but there are new problems relevant to the production and consumption of sustainable clothing. The article discusses furthermore the representation of sustainable clothing in the catalogues and fashion magazines of sustainable producers.
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Ethics in fashion as a social problem: Ethical fashion in Poland
More LessAbstractAt the beginning of the twenty-first century the issues concerning natural environment protection began to be associated with the concepts of social responsibility and corporate social responsibility, and the idea of sustainability has become a criterion for operation assessment and a particular meta-narrative. For over two decades these issues have now been also associated with the garment industry. Although in other western countries, these subjects have long been recognized as important social problems worth seeking solutions to, in Poland discussions regarding ethical fashion are still obscure. The subject of interest in this article is the analysis of the presence of ethical fashion in Poland and the shape of public discourse regarding this topic. The first part defines the concept of ethical fashion. The second part is devoted to a presentation of the most important entities and practices associated with ethical fashion in Poland and the attempts to establish how important these issues are for contemporary Polish people. The third part presents the results of the study on ethical fashion and its role in Polish public discourse, especially in the manners of framing and interpreting in Polish opinion-forming media the problem of the garment factory catastrophe in Bangladesh. The principal aim of the presented analysis is the attempt to provide the answer to the following question: are the issues of ethics and fashion industry responsibility perceived as a significant problem in Poland?
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Spinning a sustainable yarn: Environmental sustainability and brand story in the Australian fashion industry
By Alice PayneAbstractIn the Australian fashion industry, few fashion brands have intervened in the design of their products or the systems around their product to tackle environmental pollution and waste. Instead, support of charities (whether social or environmental) has become conflated with sustainability in the eyes of the public. Thus it is difficult to assess with any accuracy fashion brands’ response to sustainability. This article aims to address this through proposing a categorization system to structure the various interventions that a company may make. This system is applied to two case studies, analysing campaigns that respond to environmental sustainability by two established Australian brands, Country Road and Billabong. The case studies demonstrate how the interventions employed by a company, at least in the Australian context, are carefully developed to align with their brand story, revealing the interplay between the intangible aspects of a brand’s positioning and the tangible, measurable impacts of their garments.
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Eccentric fashions: Prison and creativity
By Carla LunghiAbstractVery particular forms of cultural production are presented in this article which explores three Italian brands: Sartoria San Vittore, I Gatti Galeotti and Made in carcere. These brands come from cooperatives working in San Vittore jail in Milan, and Lecce’s and Trani’s jails, and they are located in a very particular position within the Italian fashion system. Within such experiences, creative fashion work seems to develop not only as aesthetic research, experimentation and planning ability, but also as a form of social redemption and inclusion. Prison fashion brands are able to show new cultural ferments introducing, in daily garments, original emotions and stories, which talk of periphery but also of creativity, inclusion and handcraft, and work with the logic of beauty and production quality in order to recover and re-socialize people at the borders. They create a sustainable aesthetics which points to new productive horizons and new lifestyles and consumptions in accordance with contemporary scarcity of economic and cultural resources.
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Understanding the links between positive psychology and fashion: A grounded theory analysis
Authors: Christoph-Simon Masuch and Kate HefferonAbstractFashion is clearly under-represented within contemporary psychology. Amongst the few empirical works that do exist, individual clothing behaviours are frequently dealt with in a context of psychological ill-being. This contradicts earlier psychological writings where clothing practices were thought to be life-affirming and well-being enhancing activities. Against this backdrop, this study explored fashion from a positive psychological perspective. Ten participants reported their subjective experience of day-to-day clothing practices in response to open-ended inquiry. Grounded theory analysis revealed that clothing practices were employed as powerful techniques to negotiate selfhood, befriend the body and manage mood. The interaction of these three processes enabled the management of everyday well-being as fashion was found to be a rich source of positivity in participants’ lives. These findings have far-reaching implications for the field of (positive) psychology, opening up a number of doors for potential future research.
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Fashion as a site for memory: Reflections on a fashion exhibition, ‘Clive Rundle About Memory’
More LessAbstractThis article aims to explore the complex curatorial approach of my exhibition titled ‘Clive Rundle About Memory’, held in Johannesburg, 24 June–24 July 2011. The exhibition resulted from investigations into notions of memory in the work of South African fashion designer Clive Rundle. Shown in an art gallery, the installation afforded Rundle’s work a context away from an aesthetic or material approach to the fashion exhibition, rather employing more conceptual methodologies.
I will discuss the components of the exhibition and address the research conducted around Rundle’s work that explored these traces of history and memory surfacing in the present, as sites of narrative with multiple histories and entangled pasts. I have considered the complex constructions of Rundle’s own creative processes with his compositions of dialectical senses, histories and temporalities that blur the boundaries between art and fashion, between function and aesthetics. In this article I investigate the presentation of these fashioned slippages between the past and the contemporary, between history and memory, between absence and presence, and where negotiations of meaning begin to surface and disappear.
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