Aesthetic Fashion Research Articles

Formats, fabrics, and fashions: muslim headscarves revisited

ABSTRACTChanges in the sartorial practices of Dutch-Turkish women who wear Muslim headscarves may be summarized as a shift from sober, religiously inspired forms of dress towards colorful, more fashionable styles. A focus on the materiality of headscarves indicates, however, that the relation between Islam, dress, and fashion is more complex. The main motivation for the women to adopt headscarves, including the fashionable ones, is religious. They do so because they consider it a practice prescribed in the foundational Islamic texts and because presenting a pleasant, up-to-date look can be considered as a form of visual da'wa. At the same time, however, wearing particular styles of fashionable headscarves also performs other, non-religious, identities and forms of belonging, such as those pertaining to status, ethnicity, and professionalism. This is evident in how fabrics (such as silk) and shapes of headscarves (square or rectangular) matter. An investigation of headscarves as particular items of dress is, in turn, helpful to understand the limits of a focus on aesthetic styles and fashion. The headscarf format makes these items of dress easy to acquire and hard to discard, because they are often received as gifts. A woman's attachment to particular headscarves—materializing social relations and functioning as souvenirs—goes beyond aesthetic styles and mitigates the force of fashion.

한국 패션디자인·미학 분야의 연구동향 - 「복식」(2001~2010)을 중심으로 -

The Purpose of this study was to investigate research trends of subject matter in fashion design aesthetic field in clothing and textiles and to suggest the information for the future directions for fashion business and research. 1089 articles with clothing and textiles subject matter, 523 articles with fashion design aesthetic field in the Journal of Korean Society of Costume from 2001 through 2010 were analyzed. The major conclusions of the study are as the following: 1. Fashion design aesthetic field took absolute majority in the researches of the clothing and textiles in the Journal of Korean Society of Costume, in the 2000s. 2. Fashion design aesthetic field showed more proportions in the latter half of the decade. 3. History of costume, fashion marketing field were followed. Textiles science field took extremely little proportion. 4. In fashion design aesthetic field, topic of fashion design elements and types took absolute majority. 5. Fashion aesthetics, fashion design development, makeup hair style topics were followed.

Analysing the influence of the presentation of fashion garments on young consumers’ online behaviour

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to identify the web experience elements that aid the interaction between the consumer and fashion garments online. Two elements have been identified, product viewing and fashion information online, and analysis of the effects of these elements and the influence they have on consumers’ behaviour and decision‐making process are explored.Design/methodology/approachQualitative data collection was employed utilising both photo‐elicitation and projective techniques during in‐depth interviews. Analysis of the elements is necessary to confirm how the cues are likely to affect the consumers’ interaction and influence the consumers’ shopping experience. Focus is placed on hedonic and utilitarian effects and purchase intentions towards fashion apparel investigating young consumers in reference to online retailing.FindingsIt is evident from the interviews that the two elements create very different experiences for the consumer with regards to viewing fashion online, the first area identified functional product viewing, allows the consumer to personalise how they view and interact with the garment stimulating more utilitarian effects, whilst the second area, aesthetic fashion information is driven by the retailer providing advice and information about the garments stimulating hedonic effects. Online fashion retailers must sufficiently intertwine hedonic entertainment with practical utilitarianism to provide a satisfying online shopping experience.Originality/valueThis research provides an examination into the complex area of interaction with garments online and its link to fashion‐related consumer behaviour. This study makes an important contribution to the literature to date, and raises additional questions for future research.

Foucault and the Ethics of Eating

In a 1983 interview, Michel Foucault contrasts our contemporary interest in sexual identity with the ancient Greek preoccupation with diet, arguing that sex has replaced food as the privileged medium of self-constitution in the modern West. In the same interview, Foucault argues that modern liberation movements should return to the ancient model of ethics, of which diet was a prime example, as aesthetics or self-transformative practice. In this paper I take up Foucault's argument with respect to the Animal Liberation Movement and the dietetics of ethical vegetarianism. Contra Foucault, I suggest that diet has not been replaced by sexuality in the modern West, and that food choices, along with and intertwined with sexuality, continue to function as practices of self-constitution in both disciplinary and aesthetic fashions. I then consider the implications of this argument for the Animal Liberation Movement, exploring ways in which it might (and to some degree already does) take on aesthetic rather than moral strategies in order to pursue what Foucault once described as “an ethics of acts and their pleasures which would be able to take into account the pleasure of the other.”

The aesthetics of luxury fashion, body and identify formation

In this paper we theorize and empirically investigate how female consumers' attitudes and preferences relating to bodily appearance are linked to their perceptions of the aesthetics of fashion. Our theoretical work is informed by three streams of research: aesthetics of production, aesthetics of reception and aesthetic labor. These three converge to illuminate our study. Using the ZMET technique, we uncover four themes: fashion as wearable art, body and self-identity, bodily appearance and high fashion brands, and aesthetic labor through fashion. Our focus on the aesthetics of fashion and identity formation provides a segue into the broader discussion of the growing importance of aesthetics in understanding consumer behavior.

Modernist Aesthetics and Consumer Culture in the Writings of Oscar Wilde (review)

Reviewed by: Modernist Aesthetics and Consumer Culture in the Writings of Oscar Wilde Ilya Parkins Modernist Aesthetics and Consumer Culture in the Writings of Oscar Wilde. Paul L. Fortunato. London and New York: Routledge, 2007. Pp. xi + 162. $110.00 (cloth). Paul L. Fortunato’s investigation of Oscar Wilde seeks to situate Wilde firmly as an exponent of what Fortunato names “consumer modernism.” Defining his project against Wilde critics who view the author’s work as a sustained critique of mass culture, Fortunato proposes that the development of an aesthetics and ethics of consumption is key to understanding Wilde’s trajectory. The book is thus primarily engaged in a retrieval of an “aesthetics of surface [that Wilde] theorizes by building a philosophy of art through an analysis of consumer fashion” (viii). To build a study that is rooted in mass rituals and everyday practices, Fortunato is largely concerned with those critical objects that are usually seen as peripheral to Wilde’s career. What this means is that several chapters of the book focus on the social milieus of which Wilde was a part, with Fortunato arguing that “Wilde was a professional networker,” (1) who depended for his success upon his contacts in the worlds of both mass culture and high society: “in order to be most fully himself, he needed an immediate relationship to the cosmopolis” as a commercial center (2). Discussion of social networks in Chapter One provides, for Fortunato, the necessary background to a study of the early years of Wilde’s career, with a focus on his much-neglected journalism. The analysis of Wilde’s journalism begins with Chapter Two, “Newspaper Culture in the Pall Mall Gazette Years (1884–1890).” Here, Fortunato’s primary interest is in situating Wilde in the context of the developing new journalism of the 1880s. He argues that an understanding of Wilde’s journalistic work is imperative for an accurate picture of Wilde: “We fail to understand what is most powerful about his well-known books and plays if we ignore their connection with his journalistic-critical work; both aspects of his career are animated by the self-same aesthetic concerns and the same engagement with mass culture” (17). Fortunato thus traces the contours of an ephemeral aesthetics of surface and sensation in Wilde’s popular criticism, aiming, one surmises, to connect these with the author’s later fiction and dramaturgy. [End Page 623] The interest in journalism is carried through Chapter Three, “The Woman’s World (1887–1889) as Fashion Magazine and Modernist Laboratory.” Fortunato traces Wilde’s relationship with female aesthetes and examines how their philosophies of gendered aestheticism—which he reads as validating feminized and trivialized activities such as interior decoration and self-fashioning—find their way into print in Woman’s World under Wilde’s editorship. Chapter Four, on “Philosophy with a Needle and Thread: The Aesthetics of Fashion in Baudelaire, Wilde, and Tomson/Watson,” is a closer examination of what Fortunato deems to be a coherent aesthetic philosophy in the popular criticism of these three figures, and proves to be the most suggestive chapter of the book. Moving away from journalism, Fortunato turns, in the final two chapters, to the operation of this aesthetics of fashionable surfaces in Wilde’s early play, Lady Windermere’s Fan. He posits that the work is “an explicitly anti-Ibsen play” (101), arguing that its popular form derives from Wilde’s interest in repudiating the gravitas associated with Ibsen’s dramas. The production of the play, a seemingly “conventional” study in self-fashioning, in fact is a potent social vehicle because of the connections it instantiates between drama and the fashion, design, and “star” industries. In the final chapter, Fortunato suggests that Lady Windermere’s Fan is a modernist innovation not only because of the circumstances of its production, but because the character Mrs. Erlynne is a modernist artist engaged in fashioning both herself and the play’s audience. This chapter seems, albeit implicitly, to bring elements of sociological analysis to bear on the philosophy suggested by the text; Fortunato theorizes about the social functions of ritual, “identity as a spectrum of performance,” and “the image as culture-shaper” (124, 132...

'A clinging Liberty tea-gown instead of a magenta satin': The Colour Red in ArtisticDress by Liberty & Co.

This article addresses questions about the use of strong colours, particularly red, in aesthetic fashions of the late nineteenth century. Contrary to our perception of the Aesthetic Movement, there are actually images, surviving textile patterns and literature which show that strong reds were used in dress, despite the fact that there appear to be no surviving Liberty garments in these colours. Rather than because of a disdain for cheap dyes, it is due rather to practical matters: ideas about the unhealthy aspects of certain dyes and the unreliability of their colour fastness seem stronger than class-bound feelings of contempt.

Fashion as Art; is Fashion Art?

The question whether fashion can be regarded as a form of art begs the question of what kinds of things can legitimately be thus regarded.<brp>In the first section, some of the most recent contributions to dealing with this issue are critically analyzed. The conclusion that emerges is that—like art—clothes can provide the subject of historical research. The second section deals with the aesthetics of clothes. If sartorial fashion can be a form of art then we need an aesthetics of fashion. Whilst it would be difficult to contest the artistic quality of clothes throughout the centuries, fashion—like architecture—fulfills primarily a functional dimension. Some of the key concepts pertaining to classical aesthetics, such as taste in the writings of Edmund Burke, the Third Earl of Shaftesbury, and Immanuel Kant with special reference to Kant's less well-known writings on anthropology under which he classified fashion, are discussed. Some of the more recent contributions such as Curt J. Ducasse's brilliant 1944 article “The Art of Personal Beauty” are also discussed in this section. Finally, Karen Hanson in her article “Dressing Up, Dressing Down: The Philosophic Fear of Fashion” addresses this important issue, arguing that—like dance perhaps—fashion has systematically been disregarded by philosophers as a worthy subject of research. Like so many articles in Fashion Theory, this article is an attempt to redress this balance by seeking new ways of providing a serious theoretical and aesthetic basis for the study of sartorial fashion.

FASHIONING AESTHETICISM BY AESTHETICIZING FASHION: WILDE, BEERBOHM, AND THE MALE AESTHETES’ SARTORIAL CODES

“Strange, that a pair of silk stockings should so upset a nation.”— Oscar Wilde, quoted in Richard Ellmann’s Oscar WildeTODAY, WE TEND TO ENVISION the male Aesthete as a lanky, long-haired swain outfitted in velveteen pantaloons and clutching an outsize sunflower, an image straight from George du Maurier’s Punch cartoons or Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience. Serious scholars of Aestheticism often prefer to resist this parodic image, insisting on the movement’s significant philosophical development in Ruskin’s and Pater’s work.1 Yet Aesthetic fashion was not just a frivolous side effect of the movement. In fact, Aesthetic fashion was the focus of late-Victorian attention because it so clearly displayed the anxieties, stresses, and formulations of the movement. It was a battlefield for competing voices within Aestheticism; it was a stage whereon the various gender notions of the movement could be displayed; and it functioned as both a critique and a form of art. This article examines the theoretical rationales for Aesthetic fashion, focusing on the paradigmatic figures of Oscar Wilde, Max Beerbohm, and George du Maurier. They demonstrate how Aesthetic men developed new visual codes to reconfigure their fear of feminization, creating a new kind of body which could be read as an essential, unchanging, scholarly, and artistic icon.

Boundaries and the Victorian Body: Aesthetic Fashion in Gilded Age America

Boundaries and the Victorian Body: Aesthetic Fashion in Gilded Age America Get access Mary W. Blanchard Mary W. Blanchard Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 100, Issue 1, February 1995, Pages 21–50, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/100.1.21 Published: 01 February 1995

Boundaries and the Victorian Body: Aesthetic Fashion in Gilded Age America

Boundaries and the Victorian Body: Aesthetic Fashion in Gilded Age America

The Thoreauvian Pilgrimage: The Structure of an American Cult

rHE subject of canonization has prompted much innovative work in recent American literary history and theory. This scholarship has established that canons are culture-specific instruments of promotion and exclusion, and it has begun to explain canonical formation and change in terms of models of cultural hegemony more complex and hard-headed than traditional historicists and New Critics employed: models that take into account not just aesthetic fashion and the philosophical temper of the age but also the more tangible power conferred by race, gender, and class. Since it began as a challenge to the received conception of who are the major authors deserving close study, the newer scholarship has understandably concentrated on the claims of figures marginalized by the received canon and on questioning the unexamined assumptions behind such exclusions. Little has been written about the phenomenon of canonical investment itself: that is, the rituals of remembrance through which those regarded for whatever reason as literary heroes become enshrined. Hence the present article, which examines the major forms of public reverence for Thoreau in particular and Transcendental Concord in general. Since Thoreau has become the closest approximation to a folk hero that American literary history has ever seen, and since Concord is still America's most sacred literary spot, this will be a case study representative in the Emersonian rather than in the statistical sense. But by the same token it should help to show that the sacral vocabulary drawn from biblical studies and hagiography by critical discussions of literary canonization points to patterns of behavior and experience that run deeper than such analogizing generally claims, patterns that substantiate the present climate of skepticism toward

The Dime Novel Western by Daryl Jones

242 Western American Literature Chapter four’s “Characters” are as bizarre a cast of characters as any town could ever assemble, including (besides an astonishing collection of Flynns and Gormans) two non-irishmen with fantastic histories. There is Buster Copeland, son of the local milliner, who returns from the Orient to insert an exotic blade between his father’s fifth and sixth ribs — and won acquittal for the act. And Norwegian Henry Kolbo, who was the local movie projectionist while a Kenmare high school student, went on to amass several million dollars before he died in a 707 crash on Mt. Fuji in 1967. The Morrow book is anything but a sober-sided account of life on the North Dakota frontier. There is not a drab scene or a dull passage in the book. The actual texture of the prose is more surrealistic than realistic, as the adventures and anecdotes of these “poor, bigotted, and quarrelsome” Irish are revealed to us. The book is packed with characters and episodes that come at us with bewildering speed and variety. But it is the Irish who give the book its distinctive flavor. CLARENCE A. GLASRUD, Moorhead State University The Dime Novel Western. By Daryl Jones. (Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowl­ ing Green University Popular Press, 1978. 186 pages, $8.95 cloth, $3.95 paper.) If it is true, as Daryl Jones says, that the dime novels that remain today are physically deteriorating, difficult of access, and too much ne­ glected by scholars, then his little book should mend that situation. It is to be highly recommended as a sensible, straightforward, and comprehensive survey. Jones’ organizational scheme is a bit prosaic, perhaps, but serviceable. The heart of the book is the chapters that consider the settings, the types of heroes and heroines, and the plots. Within those general topics, Jones strongly emphasizes the chronological development that occurred as the dime novel kept pace with changing cultural forces and aesthetic fashions. The complexity that his attention to chronological development produces is perhaps the strongest feature of the book, and it exposes the superficial generalizations most of us are wont to make regarding the dime novel. Methodologically, Jones stands firmly in the American Studies tradition of Henry Nash Smith and John Cawelti, which deals with popular litera­ ture by identifying genre conventions and explaining their appeal by cor­ relating them to contemporary or universal cultural anxieties. But Jones’ book contains a whiff of rebellion against that tradition. Almost alone Reviews 243 among the Caweltians, Jones chooses to act upon Cawelti’s suggestion that aesthetic, as well as purely cultural, considerations might be worth explor­ ing. “Changes in the character of the Western hero,” Jones tells us, “re­ sulted from the complex interplay of several aesthetic and socio-psychological dynamics which, in the last analysis, remain inextricably inter­ woven.” (p. 117) One hopes that scholars will follow Jones’ lead. If they do, we will soon have a deeper and more balanced appreciation for popu­ lar literature than the American Studies tradition has yet given us. One hopes, too, that Jones’ book will launch a movement to study, preserve, and make more accessible the dime novels that still exist. Paper­ back reprints of a few outstanding or representative examples of the genre, like Philip Durham’suseful — but lonely— editions of Seth Jones and Deadwood Dick on Deck (1966) would be most welcome. GARY TOPPING, Utah State Historical Society The Last Good Kiss. By James Crumley. (New York: Random House, 1978. 259 pages, $8.95.) Although nobody has investigated the genealogical niceties in detail, it is pretty generally agreed that westerns and thrillers have family in com­ mon. The relationship may not be conjugal or parental, but the two are at least kissing cousins. They are also both commonly assumed to wear the bar sinister of polite letters, to be the sort of kinfolk that are fine in their place, but that you wouldn’t want your daughter to marry. Some­ thing like this could (and doubtless will) be said of The Last Good Kiss which, if read unsympathetically, can easily be dismissed as yet another whodunit, genus private eye, species missing person. Ostensibly this novel asks the question...