The appeal and impact of social media influencers within contemporary consumer culture has been a much-explored topic in fashion and media research. However, there are limited studies of yogalebrities – celebrity yoga practitioners who gain global visibility and following through branded product endorsements and modelling contracts – despite their leading role within the culturally and economically significant wellness industry. Furthermore, while the existing scholarship considers the intersections between consumer culture and spirituality, it is yet to grant due recognition to the active production and consumption of fashionable spiritual feminine identities produced on and through prevalent social media. Drawing on the combined insights from media, fashion and feminist studies, we discuss how yogalebrities represent and perpetuate normative ideals about femininity and its spiritual dimensions. We ground the discussion in the analysis of two different cases of yogalebrities: celebrity influencer Sjana Elise and micro-influencer Jessamyn Stanley. We demonstrate how they fold entrepreneurial opportunities into self-actualizing, self-branded intimate narratives to seek legitimacy and commercial success, and how their audience engagement capitalizes on, commodifies and stylizes spiritual values that underpin western yoga philosophy. By documenting these complex tactics, we contribute to fashion studies’ and feminist media studies’ understanding of the mediatized and increasingly fashionable psychic life of women.

In the spring of 2023, my father, Arturo, died of brain cancer at the age of 55, after a decade of illness. As he was dying, I began to process my anticipatory grief by writing about my emotional attachments to his clothing. Drawing on material culture, affect and design theory, this article looks at my family’s personal experience of my father’s illness and death to investigate the emotional possibilities and limits of garments belonging to palliative care patients and their loved ones. By looking closely at the material resonances of my father’s clothing while he died, this article explores how clothes reflect the confusing nature of time, grief and love when losing a parent to long-term illness. In theorizing the experience of losing a parent through a material culture lens, this article explores the liminality of anticipating a significant familial loss and the affective qualities of the garments that endure through it.

Significant discrimination is directed towards Muslim women who dress modestly. Despite this, Muslims around the world continue to spend tens of billions of dollars on modest fashion. Past research in modest fashion has focused on modest fashion influencers, the industry or on veiling. Muslim women’s everyday dress practices and their lived experiences have not been studied through an intersectional lens. Through an intersectional theoretical framework, this research uses wardrobe interviews with sixteen Muslim women to explore how they embody their identity through modest fashion, how intersectionality impacts their clothing choices and what contexts influence their sartorial decisions. Three themes emerge: what influences their style; how they shop and style outfits; and what consequences are faced. By prioritizing modesty as a sartorial practice, these women are diverting the western gaze, navigating away from superficial and oppressive western beauty ideals and challenging narrow Islamophobic stereotypes.

This article is presented as a methodological proposal for the field of fashion studies based on the interpretive model Somatheque (2013) of the theorist and activist Paul B. Preciado. Through this theoretical model, which draws lines of feminist post-structuralism and queer phenomenology, this study argues that the enunciation of the body as an archive is divided into four layers of analysis: (1) the biological body as a medical discourse, (2) power practices, (3) body techniques and (4) apparatus of verification. This study will provide a detailed analysis of the CK One advertising campaign called ‘Altered States’, launched by Calvin Klein in 1995. Specifically, it will assess the applicability of the Somatheque model in fashion studies by considering perfume as a central object of study within the fashion system. Thus, the study of this campaign serves as an example that illustrates how perfume not only plays a pivotal role in fashion studies but also acts as a significant element in the shaping, producing and encoding of the body within its context and allows for the exploration of fashion as a cultural and biopolitical practice influenced by privilege, asymmetrical power relations and colonial institutions.

This article explores the innovative method of patchwork ethnography, which was first introduced by Günel, Varma and Watanabe in 2020, and its applicability to the area of fashion studies. It elaborates on the features, qualities and limitations of the method. The article does so by reflecting on the ethnographic research I conducted for my Ph.D. thesis. In March–August 2019 and January–July 2021, I used a patchwork ethnography approach to participant observation, interviews, digital ethnography and visual analysis to study the trade and retail of Chinese-made garments and textiles in Mozambique. The article puts a special focus on the difficulties and restrictions arising from the COVID-19 pandemic, and how these can be offset by the specific characteristics of patchwork ethnography. Apart from discussing the issues relating to my positionality and privilege as an educated white female researcher in a cross-cultural Global South context, it also hopes to further push the ongoing decolonization of fashion studies. It therefore aims to show that the applicability and relevance of patchwork ethnography go beyond periods shaped by pandemic restrictions. More generally, this article emphasizes the necessity and benefit of an interdisciplinary mindset and creative, flexible, multi-method approaches to understand and tackle the great challenges of our time that relate to the production, trade and consumption of fashion products.

This article presents my reflections on a method that attempts to bridge a methodological divide in fashion studies by blending garment analysis and wardrobe interviews. In doing so it presents the ways in which we can consider evidence from the subject, the object and the subject–object assemblage. Garment analysis is a method rooted in dress history and fashion curation, whereas wardrobe interviews grew out of anthropology and sociology. While wardrobe interviews do to some extent offset the preference for language in interviews, what is missing was a systematic way of encouraging a deeper engagement with that garment. Interview techniques can provoke the wearers or owners of clothes to narrate their garments. With one method we consider the object, the other method the subject. My research gathers evidence from both the subject and the object by blending garment analysis with wardrobe interviews to uncover the meanings entangled in objects and memories, to interrogate what we can consider evidence from the subject, the object and the subject–object assemblage. My study explores how this methodological pluralism can allow movement between material, semiotic and affective interpretations of garments. I conclude by emphasizing the importance of both the physical garment and the embodied experience of wearing to fashion research and argue that ‘turns’ in the discipline should instead be considered as expansions that allow the coexistence of multiple approaches.

I reflect upon working on diverse fashion(-related) cases in the context of the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis. Drawing on Mieke Bal’s understanding of cultural analysis (characterized by interdisciplinarity, among others), I refer to some fashion and material objects I have looked at (e.g. a contemporary video by a Dutch designer, a wardrobe-suitcase of 1919 or the pandemic mask), while insisting on considering them as theoretical objects through the practice of clothes-reading. Rather than establishing programmatic grids to study fashion, I share my observations and interrogations on working with and through fashion. What follows resembles an ongoing inventory of my fashion interests, aspirations and inspirations as well as choices and doubts that altogether echo the performative gesture of research.

The T-girl is a trans feminine subject whose trans-ness is embodied sartorially in controlled environments for a short amount of time. Her trans-ness is not socially visible, her existential possibilities have accompanied the imbrication of digitality in everyday life and she escapes well-acknowledged trans feminine categories such as the Latin American travesti or the trans woman writ large. The T-girl is yet to be rigorously theorized. In this auto-theoretical psychoanalytic inquiry I propose to theorize her alongside her lovers by placing the sartorial as the de facto object of desire between them. The methodology involves culling from personal sartorial-sexual experience as well as the language around clothes found in private messages sent by trans-attracted and straight-identified men to the author, a T-girl. What does such an intimate archive tell us about the way the trans subject negotiates her desire with and through the other? Their sartorial exchanges serve as unprecedented insight into the intrapsychic mechanisms a trans subject deploys to forge a position for herself where the sartorial all but replaces the anatomical as the slippery guarantor of gender. I articulate the function of clothing in conjuring a trans-ness addressed to a ‘other’ interpellated to ratify the (trans-)gendering process. This turns out to be a rather primary dynamic that founds the speaking subject as such. And yet, the T-girl and her lovers may end up getting more than what they bargained for from their sartorial-sexual encounter. What becomes clear is the fundamental function of clothes not just to render the T-girl girl, but as exhilarating signifiers in the written and oral exchanges between the T-girl and her lovers. Particularly for the lovers themselves, who can be quick to slip from the position of the subject who enjoys feminine clothing in the other to that of the subject who enjoys wearing such clothing themselves.

Recent calls for decentring Eurocentric frameworks across fashion studies, alongside growing commitments to worker rights, calls for a circular economy, waste reduction and more sustainable materials draw attention to the complex and intractable social, environmental and political challenges facing the global sector. Here we point out how academic research is also implicated in reproducing inequalities, through practices of data collection, analysis and knowledge dissemination. Specifically, in the case of fashion, how worker representation, and indeed worker control over representations of their lived experiences, including labour activism, is lacking in academic research. In this article, we argue that DIY Academic Archiving can be utilized by academics, including fashion scholars, as a powerful tool for remaking fashion research. We propose unsettling usual practices around data management, as well as redirecting current moves for open research data. Turning instead to inspiration from radical archival theory and practice, we explore the potential for co-creating open-access digital archives of research data – here workers’ own stories – to open up possibilities for workers to be more involved in the creation of public narratives about fashion. While not a panacea for resolving all the ills of the fashion industry, we see research processes where workers have more control over their own stories, and how they are used, as a critical step in reimagining fashion scholarship.

Aiming to disrupt the way fashion studies is developed – often from a Eurocentric approach and within rigid disciplinary, methodological and social boundaries – this Special Issue invites different scholars to present their own way of studying and exploring fashion, but also to make their familiar methods strange, re-assessing what fashion means and what it means to do fashion research in the first place. Promoting an interdisciplinary dialogue, the articles in this Special Issue show how fashion studies would benefit from ‘bending’ existing methodological boundaries and blending cross-disciplinary methodologies, conceptual orientations, objects, ideas, forms, subjects and questions in their epistemological approach. We hope that the curation, organization and general assemblage of the texts give rise to the intellectual alchemy of unpredictable encounters: conversations, clashes and contradictions. From article to article, readers will encounter different ways of doing research on and through fashion and be inspired to imagine more divergent epistemologies of fashion.