Fashion Narratives Research Articles

Confronting the Absence of Histories, Presence of Traumas and Beauty in Museum Africa, Johannesburg

Museum Africa is Johannesburg’s social and cultural history museum and holds within its collection the Bernberg Costumes & Textiles Collection; an extensive collection of predominantly white-owned European fashion objects with some 16,562 items dating from the 1800 s to the late 1900s, imported into South Africa or made locally. This article documents the continued enquiry between South African fashion designer and artist Wanda Lephoto, London-based fashion curator Alison Moloney, and South African-based fashion curator and academic Dr Erica de Greef who together have been grappling with the violence of absence of black South African fashion histories and narratives that is revealed in the museum’s store. This enquiry is founded on a phenomenological approach to dress curatorship with the intention to unravel the collection’s epistemology through an interrogation of decolonial curatorial methodologies. The artistic interventions aim to disrupt the Eurocentric and exclusionary acquisition practices and fashion discourses that are represented by these seemingly “innocent” but deeply problematic objects. Can an engagement with these fashion objects through experiments with museological interventions decolonize and unpack the complex histories held within the collection and contribute to a process of healing?

Towards a decolonial feminist fashion design reading list

Although reading lists are an important part of curricula and play an essential role in decolonizing education, the work to diversify them can often neglect intersectional approaches that consider both racialized and gendered dimensions of knowledge construction. The consequence can be an additive approach in which black authors and authors of colour are included to diversify reading lists, reproducing racist and sexist biases. This paper examines how reading lists are constructed in curricula and presents an alternative decolonial feminist approach to creating a reading list in fashion design. The value of decolonial feminism lies in addressing the gaps in thinking by using a racializedandgendered framework. The Decolonizing the Curriculum Toolkit project at Westminster University, UK is introduced to which the author contributed a Decolonising Fashion Design Reading List, as an example of counter-hegemonic curricula which aimed to reveal the unequal power dynamics that support colonial logics in fashion design education. Exposing hegemonic distinctions in fashion that represent Western fashion as modern and non-Western fashion as traditional can then allow marginalized and excluded fashion narratives to become centred. Such an approach can then provide a key tool towards building a more pluralised and de-hierarchised set of fashion design resources.

Religion, civility and the ‘British’ of Ireland in the 1641 Irish rebellion

AbstractThis article examines the 1641 Irish rebellion through a neglected manuscript account from 1643, written by Henry Jones and three of his 1641 deposition colleagues. The ‘Treatise’ offers important insights into the rebellion, but also advances a broader understanding of the significance of the early modern efforts to civilise Ireland and the impact of these schemes, especially plantation, on the kind of conflict that erupted in the 1640s. It is an evaluation that brings together both the long pre-history of the rebellion, and what eventually unfolded, offering new perspectives into a crucial and contested debate within modern historiography. The ‘Treatise’ also presents the opportunity to interrogate the position of the settler community, and their careful construction and presentation of a religiously- and culturally-driven improvement of the country. While it was a period of crisis, the rebellion offered an important opportunity to reflect on the wider project of Irish conversion and civility. It was a moment of creation and self-creation, as the emerging ‘British’ community not only digested the shock of the rebellion, but sought to fashion narratives that underlined their moral claims to Ireland on the grounds of true religion and civility.

Independent fashion designers in the elusive fashion city

This article examines the cultural geography of fashion cities, focusing on independent fashion designers’ relationships with their city. Through discussing the Australian city of Brisbane and its place within the hierarchy of fashion cities, we examine the position of modern yet peripheral locations that have what we term an ‘elusive’ fashion identity. The discussion highlights the complexities that make a city a fashion city, specifically the interplay between industry, culture, retail and design, commonly identified as fundamental elements in the construction or transformation of fashion cities. The paper unravels the dynamics and discourses that have contributed to the contemporary conceptualisation of the fashion city; it evaluates the way in which local independent fashion designers (IFDs) can contribute to a reorientation of thinking about cities and their fashion; and it gauges how IFDs sustain a local fashion identity within cities that do not present the commonly recognised characteristics of a fashion city such as infrastructures. We argue that IFDs in peripheral cities have a very different relationship with their city than do IFDs in so-called fashion cities. By examining this relationship, and Brisbane’s modestly placed position on fashion cities’ hierarchy, we propose that, except for the traditional fashion centres, other cities are in a constant state of flux, arguing that the concept of the fashion city itself is elusive. We propose that as cities experience fashion narratives that ebb and flow, they may present multiple characteristics that make them unique at a particular moment, thus they are ‘elusive’ fashion cities.

Still putting on the style: Older men’s ‘fashion narratives’

Abstract In 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.

Decoding the neural representation of story meanings across languages.

Drawing from a common lexicon of semantic units, humans fashion narratives whose meaning transcends that of their individual utterances. However, while brain regions that represent lower-level semantic units, such as words and sentences, have been identified, questions remain about the neural representation of narrative comprehension, which involves inferring cumulative meaning. To address these questions, we exposed English, Mandarin, and Farsi native speakers to native language translations of the same stories during fMRI scanning. Using a new technique in natural language processing, we calculated the distributed representations of these stories (capturing the meaning of the stories in high-dimensional semantic space), and demonstrate that using these representations we can identify the specific story a participant was reading from the neural data. Notably, this was possible even when the distributed representations were calculated using stories in a different language than the participant was reading. Our results reveal that identification relied on a collection of brain regions most prominently located in the default mode network. These results demonstrate that neuro-semantic encoding of narratives happens at levels higher than individual semantic units and that this encoding is systematic across both individuals and languages. Hum Brain Mapp 38:6096-6106, 2017. © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

The Fashion Narratives of Tom Ford: Nocturnal Animals and Contemporary Cinema

Tom Ford adapts a second novel and once again transforms the environment of the central protagonist; Susan, mother and part-time teacher, now becomes a successful art gallery owner married to a millionaire. These changes create problems within the film, though they provide a perfect showcase for fashion. If the main narrative is centered on Susan, the second dramatizes the events of the novel she reads, while a third strand provides flashbacks. But Ford has created what is arguably a fourth narrative of dress, décor, and lifestyle. Consequently, this film characterizes more general trends involving the contemporary fusion of fashion and film, the appropriation of fashion imagery by the feature film and vice versa, and the overall impact of the promotional fashion video. The essay explores the prevalence of fashion within the contemporary mediascape, and the new ways in which fashion and film are interlinked.

Inside Bickle's Brain: Scorsese, Schrader, and Wolfe on Psychological Realism

:In their four collaborations, Paul Schrader and Martin Scorsese fashion narratives from the subjective point of view of disturbed loners. As these men withdraw further into isolation, they can construct in their imagination an alternative universe with only minimal relationship to external reality.

Fashioning the sixties: fashion narratives of older women

ABSTRACTThe popular media suggest that we are witnessing ‘a fashion for older women’ and that ‘the latest new faces to light up campaigns and covers’ are retirees (The Guardian, 16 September 2012). Do fashion designers know this? On the one hand, Sir Christopher Frayling, former Rector of the Royal College of Art in the United Kingdom, observes that we need a change in mind-set for the art school of the future since design students’ attitudes to designing for older people is that it is really boring (‘Start the Week’, BBC Radio 4, 19 November 2012). On the other hand, the sculptor Antony Gormley states that ‘Art schools are the things that reinforce agency in the world’. This paper emerges out of an ongoing conversation between a group of women friends about how they feel about clothes and the fashion choices on offer to them. The women constitute a sub-group of women in their sixties who grew up in the 1960s, against a background of ‘cultural revolution’ in British fashion that emerged out of the art schools.

Special issue of The Journal of Clothing Cultures: Transglobal Fashion Narratives & Style Cultures, October 2015

Abstract

Fashionable Personae: Self-identity and Enactments of Fashion Narratives in Fashion Blogs

This article scrutinizes the practices and strategies mobilized by fashion bloggers in the construction of a subject position which is embedded in established fashion narratives and based on references to the self and self-representation. Fashion blogs are discussed as cultural artifacts which revolve around reflexive identity politics in contention with embodied techniques of self-fashioning and dress practices. Fashion bloggers produce fashion media partly based on the enactment of their own self-identity in relation to dress practices and on their incorporation of knowledge of fashion media and pop culture imagery. Because of this oscillation between individual dress practices and collective fashion narratives, fashion blogs raise issues about the way in which fashion media relate to self-identity. Based on empirical research with qualitative methods using a grounded theory approach, this article discusses a construct of subjectivity labeled as “fashionable persona.” The “fashionable persona” is understood as a situated, narrative, and performative character developed by bloggers specifically for their blogs that is anchored simultaneously in the blogger's self-identity and in the enactment of collective cultural narratives. Three dimensions in the enactment and construction of “fashionable personae” are discussed: the discursive construction, the bodily enactment, and the self-actualization of fashion bloggers as economic subjects.

Transatlantic Translations of the Button-down Shirt

This article looks at how the button-down shirt has been translated in the American and British contexts. Employing Barthes’ notion of ‘fashion narrative,’ I describe how in the United States, the button-down shirt is closely associated with the Ivy Look, a style that had emerged from the elite Ivy League universities but became mass fashion by the mid-1960s. While the garment remained youthful, continuing to draw on the collegiate fashion narrative, it also spoke to an American national imaginary of affluence, abundance and class mobility. Both the garment and its paratextual meanings circulated through the global fashion system, emerging in a very different context in 1960s Britain. Speaking to British imaginings of America, it remained youthful but was transformed by the particularities of the British class system, becoming closely associated with two of Britain’s working-class youth subcultures: the mods and the skinheads. Emblematic of the subterranean passion for clothing that characterised the culture of young working-class men in Britain during the latter half of the twentieth century, the button-down shirt became a subcultural icon. In turn, the historicisation and commodification of these subcultures has ensured the button-down shirt’s place in the British national imaginary. Comparing publicity materials produced by American and British clothiers, I examine how the garment’s fashion narratives, both British and American, continue to circulate.

WAGING WAR AND PEACE IN AFRICA - William Reno. Warfare in Independent Africa: New Approaches to African History. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011. xxii + 271 pp. Maps. Figures. Suggested Readings. Index. $85.00. Cloth. $27.99. Paper. - Elizabeth Schmidt. Foreign Intervention in Africa: From the Cold War to the War on Terror. New Approaches to African History.New York: Cambridge

William Reno. Warfare in Independent Africa: Approaches to African History. York: Cambridge University Press, 2011. xxii + 271 pp. Maps. Figures. Suggested Readings. Index. $85.00. Cloth. $27.99. Paper.Elizabeth Schmidt Foreign Intervention in Africa: From Cold War to War on Terror. Approaches to African History. York: Cambridge University Press. 2013. xviii + 267 pp. Illustrations. Acknowledgments. Foreword. Abbreviations. Index. $27.99. Paper.Jeremy Levitt. Illegal Peace in Africa: An Inquiry into Legality of Power Sharing with Warlords, Rebels, and Junta. York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. xi + 301 pp. Bibliography. Index. $103.00. Cloth. $34.99. Paper.The books reviewed here are written with clarity and passion and they deserve a comprehensive readership. They all embrace a sweeping geographical and conceptual terrain, but authors presuppose no prior African studies knowledge or expertise. While soaring and panoptic, these books are also richly detailed and nuanced. No single review can do them justice. Each is a major contribution that merits attention from anyone concerned with armed in Africa and efforts to resolve those conflicts.William Reno's book is part of Cambridge University Press series, New Approaches to African History, which is designed to introduce students and general readers to current findings and new ideas in African history. Reno, who is a political scientist, highlights two significant features influencing warfare in Africa during past fifty years. First, African warfare and its practitioners have always operated within an existing state system based on European colonial divisions of territory and European imposed conceptions of sovereignty. The inviolability of borders and sanctity of sovereignty explain why intrastate rather than interstate warfare has been norm in Africa. Second, over past fifty years grievances motivating rebellion have remained fairly constant. What has changed are politics that shape rebels' fields of leverage and global reception of and their aims. The book's major message is that the nature of politics in states in which they fight plays a key role in shaping organization and behavior of (161).The political imperatives that shape rebels' actions have severe consequences for noncombatants. Reno observes that conflict in much of Africa has shifted from a focus on battles over which side should control and administer non-combatant population to a situation in which governing non-combatants is often less relevant as a central strategy of war fighting (2). Both government forces and opposition groups who challenge authority of African regimes (and both of which are termed rebels by Reno) exhibit high degrees of fragmentation and little capacity to instill a common sense of purpose among combatants and noncombatants alike. This fragmentation and kaleidoscopic array of motivation and purpose is not owing solely to human frailty and avarice. Reno also stresses complexity and contingency of what it means, using James Scott's memorable phrase, to see like a state {SeeingLike a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve Human Condition Have Failed, Yale University Press, 1999).Reno identifies five rebel typologies. Anti-colonial fought to end colonial domination. They garnered support through unifying ideologies that galvanized African populations and enlisted international support: nationalism, sovereignty, human rights, and political independence. Focusing on southern Africa, Reno discusses his next grouping, rule and their campaigns and activities to eliminate white minority rule regimes in region. As with anticolonial rebels, external support was important. Like their anticolonial counterparts, majority rule sought to fashion narratives and ideologies that would mute factional and personal differences and inspire loyalty and commitment. …

Smiles as Signals of Lower Status in Football Players and Fashion Models: Evidence That Smiles are Associated with Lower Dominance and Lower Prestige

Across four studies, the current paper demonstrates that smiles are associated with lower social status. Moreover, the association between smiles and lower status appears in the psychology of observers and generalizes across two forms of status: prestige and dominance. In the first study, faces of fashion models representing less prestigious apparel brands were found to be more similar to a canonical smile display than the faces of models representing more prestigious apparel brands. In a second study, after being experimentally primed with either high or low prestige fashion narratives, participants in the low prestige condition were more likely to perceive smiles in a series of photographs depicting smiling and non-smiling faces. A third study of football player photographs revealed that the faces of less dominant (smaller) football players were more similar to the canonical smile display than the faces of their physically larger counterparts. Using the same football player photographs, a fourth study found that smiling was a more reliable indicator of perceived status-relevant personality traits than perceptions of the football players' physical sizes inferred from the photographs.

Imagining Jim Crow

Imagining Jim Crow Christopher Metress (bio) In the Shadow of the Black Beast: African American Masculinity in the Harlem and Southern Renaissances. By Andrew Leiter. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2010. x + 283 pp. $39.95 cloth. Neo-Segregation Narratives: Jim Crow in Post-Civil Rights American Literature. By Brian Norman. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2010. x + 214 pp. $59.95 cloth, $24.95 paper. In The Strange Career of Jim Crow (1955), C. Vann Woodward argued that a deeper understanding of the history of post-Reconstruction segregation would help southerners to see their institutions and social arrangements as fluid rather than “inviolable by nature.” In proposing this new narrative, Woodward was trusting that a clearer picture of segregation’s past would allow for a better future, one that did not embrace racial hierarchy as essential to southern identity. Two new studies remind us that, more than fifty years after Woodward, we are still wrestling with Jim Crow’s legacy. In many ways, Andrew Leiter’s In the Shadow of the Black Beast: African American Masculinity in the Harlem and Southern Renaissances and Brian Norman’s Neo-Segregation Narratives: Jim Crow in Post-Civil Rights American Literature demand to be read together. One should begin with Leiter, who in a series of carefully-argued chapters builds a persuasive case for how the “the black beast image,” which “developed slowly out of slavery and crystallized in white minds over the last decade of the nineteenth century,” was eventually deployed in the early twentieth century by black and white writers alike to challenge the fundamental assumptions of Jim Crow. If Leiter [End Page 145] is concerned with the role that one image played in the development of and discourse about segregation, Norman is interested in how the Jim Crow era is represented in narratives written after the civil rights movement and the dismantling of du jure segregation. According to Norman, “post-civil rights writers” fashion narratives about the Jim Crow era because those writers can “draw on the perceived clarity of that period to highlight and explain more elusive systems of racial disenfranchisement and division” existing in the present. As a result, a new genre has emerged, the “neo-segregation” narrative, and Norman argues eloquently for the importance of this genre in both contemporary literary history and current racial discourse. Leiter opens by arguing that, after Reconstruction, interracial sex was depicted differently in literature about the South. While abolitionists had trafficked in images of the lustful slave owner to combat the peculiar institution, southern writers after the war found a new weapon (the black beast image) in their fight to establish a new institution (segregation). “Gone was Stowe’s image of brute masters satisfying their lusts upon helpless enslaved women,” Leiter writes. “In its stead appeared the image of degenerate black men roaming the southern countryside looking to ravage unprotected white virgins.” The “black beast at the center of white unity and supremacy” was propagated best by Thomas Dixon, and Leiter persuasively argues that Dixon’s novels played a crucial role in solidifying segregation’s status as an inviolable social arrangement necessitated by black bestiality. Leiter’s second chapter gets to the heart of his project: juxtaposing how writers from the Harlem and Southern Renaissances engaged this inherited image of African American bestiality. Leiter begins with Walter White and James Weldon Johnson and their “literary efforts to redeem black masculinity.” Although White effectively exposed as unfounded the mass hysteria over black sexuality and transferred “the image of bestiality onto the white race,” Johnson’s redemption of black masculinity was more problematic. Unintentionally echoing Dixon’s novels, several interracial relationships in the Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man suggest that “the black male and white female cannot share the same sexual space without incurring disaster.” In his next chapter, Leiter proposes a most intriguing juxtaposition: George Schuyler’s Black No More and William Faulkner’s Light in August. According to Leiter, both works “envision whiteness as a contested space,” and both authors propose “the same dual notion of a black sexual threat that simultaneously exists and does not exist” (in Schuyler because “any concept of [End Page 146] racial identity is ridiculous...

The Metropolis in Masquerade: Melbourne ‘through the Looking-Glass’ Lens of Fashion Photography

Each of the world’s major fashion capitals has a unique and enduring identity that has in part been established through its photographic representation. Fashion magazines and advertisements have re-presented Paris, London, New York and Milan as cities at the fore-front of style and taste, not least by accessorizing fashion with iconic monuments and streetscapes. This paper questions the rhetorical devices used by photographers to establish fashion capitals as style sites. It will argue that this lexicon is so successful in representing cities as objects of fashion that locations not immediately associated with high-fashion status have been similarly posed so as to parti-cipate in the symbolic economy attributed to the renowned global fashion capitals. In analyzing fashion photographs of Melbourne from the 1950s and 60s this paper will establish that two conflicting images of the fashion city were prevalent in the metropolis’ self-imaging at this time. Specifically, this paper contends that Paris and New York shaped the aesthetic and cultural aspirations of the city as well as inspiring the fashion photographers Bruno Benini, Henry Talbot and Helmut Newton. This paper will explore how alternate photographic fashion narratives—Paris as elegant and romantic, and New York as dynamic and modern—helped to cement Melbourne as Australia’s fashion capital during this period.

Activity and meaning making in the everyday lives of people with advanced cancer

This study aims to explore and understand how people with advanced cancer create meaning and handle everyday life through activity. A purposive sample of seven participants was recruited from a larger study. Data were collected through qualitative interviews and participant observations conducted in the participants' home environments while they were engaged in activities to which they assigned particular value. Interpretive analysis was conducted using narrative theory and relevant literature. The study shows how people in conditions of advanced cancer fashion narratives useful for handling everyday life with advanced cancer. A meta-narrative of "saying goodbye in a good way" provided an overall structure for the participants as they attempted to create desired narratives negotiated in context of the individuals' sociocultural life and in the proximity of death. A narrative of "being healthy although ill" provided an arena for exploring the contrast between simultaneously feeling well and severely ill. Further emplotment of activities in "routines and continuity" was identified as a means to provide a safe, familiar framework stimulating participants' everyday agency. "My little Mecca" was identified as a narrative reflecting the activity of life-confirming experiences and taking time out. The identified narratives performed and told in daily life may guide the development of palliative care services to support people with advanced cancer in creating meaning in the remains of their lives.

Speaking of Fashion: Consumers' Uses of Fashion Discourses and the Appropriation of Countervailing Cultural Meanings

This article explores the ways that consumers use fashion discourse to inscribe their consumption behaviors in a complex ideological system of folk theories about the nature of self and society. Verbatim texts of 20 phenomenological interviews concerning consumers' perceptions and experiences of fashion are interpreted through a hermeneutic process with specific consideration given to gender issues. Whereas critics of consumer culture frequently argue that fashion discourses enshroud consumer perceptions in a common hegemonic outlook, our analysis suggests that this ideological system offers a myriad of countervailing interpretive standpoints that consumers combine, adapt, and juxtapose to fit the conditions of their everyday lives. By appropriating fashion discourse, consumers generate personalized fashion narratives and metaphoric and metonymic references that negotiate key existential tensions and that often express resistance to dominant fashion norms in their social milieu or consumer culture at large. A theoretical model is derived that portrays a dialogical relationship between consumers and this cultural system of countervailing fashion meanings. The implications of this model for future research on the meaning transfer process and the sociocognitive dimensions of consumer beliefs are discussed.

Law Frames: Historical Truth and Narrative Necessity in a Criminal Case

Postmodern storytellers can fashion narratives that convey many different, yet equally convincing, visions of reality. The film offers not just one frameup, the causal-linear frameup of Randall Dale Adams, but perpetual, repeat frameups, indifferent to narrative logic and linear time. By describing the critical storytelling failures that occur within The Thin Blue Line, I hope to elucidate important lessons for lawyers and legal scholars about the art of persuasion in legal storytelling. Yet postmodern ideas about the demise of the author and of authority in general, the dissolution of the autonomous, rational subject, the end of linear time and causation, the erasure of difference between truth and error, reality and fiction, and the abandonment of stability to the contingency of truth and justice, seem to have limited appeal and dubious utility for persuasive legal storytelling. While the affirmative postmodern concedes the demise of the autonomous modern subject, s/he still finds meaning through the distributed self: an identity made up of discrete cultural and social constructs shared by others.