Objects In Fashion Research Articles

Queen Victoria’s Banarasi Brocade: A Transcultural Approach to Royal Fashion

The fancy-dress costume worn by Queen Victoria (1819–1901) to her Stuart Ball in 1851 is an outlier amongst her surviving wardrobe. As an object of fancy dress, it combines the fashions of the mid-nineteenth century with those of the 1660 to produce a garment that is both fashionable and highly symbolic. While previous scholars and exhibition curators have been most interested in the dress as a window into Queen Victoria’s fashionable style and entertainments at Buckingham Palace, the materiality of the dress tells a deeper story. Made in the same year as the Great Exhibition, from the products of British colonial networks and structures, this dress is reflective of far more than a young woman’s fanciful tastes. The materials used firmly tied it to the mid-nineteenth century, particular with the inclusion of an Indian Banaras Brocade silk underskirt. It was the costume of a queen, worn to a highly publicized event. Reconsidering the costume as a transcultural garment broadens its significance and symbolism, reframing analysis of this costume to consider the recontextualization of Indian fabric and within this British royal fashion object.

The “deliberate calculation of dress”: Strategic Uses of Fashion in George Egerton’s Keynotes and Discords

Abstract This article argues that George Egerton uses fashion as a sign system in the short stories included in Keynotes (1893) and Discords (1894). By utilizing minimalist physical descriptions of her protagonists’ dress, she privileges interiority and emphasizes how women achieve mobility of mind and body when they are freed from the physical suppression and psychological scrutiny associated with expectations for fashionable dress. In addition, she strategically manipulates the signifiers of bourgeois femininity by separating fashionable objects from the female body—often at the stress point of a story’s closure. Using a material culture approach that situates the stories within the context of late Victorian fashion plates, the article shows how Egerton delineates her primary theme—that women are defined by their interiority and not by the hyperfeminine, fashionable objects that are fetishized as integral to Victorian womanhood.

Digital or analogue communication supports - does it matter?

ABSTRACT Digital tools are becoming more commonly used by older adults in daily life as well as in residential care to facilitate group activities. There is, however, limited research exploring how the participants orient to the tools and whether the choice of material affects the interaction between the participants. This study investigates the use of analogue and digital communication tools in group activities with older adults aged 70–90 with and without dementia in residential care. Interactions during group activities, in which analogue and digital pictures were used to stimulate conversations, were analyzed to identify differences and similarities in how the two different tools are used, as well as any potential differences between how the two groups (persons with and without dementia) orient to the materials. The analysis shows that the use of a communication supporting tool, be it analogue or digital, promotes conversations. However, the digital condition seems to afford shared focus around the device. The results also reveal that the two participating groups orient toward the material objects in a similar fashion. Thus, the choice of material objects used in group activities has consequences for the interaction and should be taken into account when planning for group activities involving persons with and without dementia.

Construction of Student Identity on the Outfit of the Day Phenomenon on Social Media Instagram

In today's digital society, the perspective regarding fashion objects, especially Outfit of the Day (OOTD), has shifted from seeing an item based on used value to symbolic value. There is a strong motivation in consumers to carry out consumption actions, so they consider OOTD products as characteristics that must be implemented through style, clothing, and symbolic meanings that are constructed through new identities. This research aims to find out the construction of adolescent identity and the implications of the identity formed related to the OOTD phenomenon. The theory used in this research is Peter Burke's Identity Theory. This research uses a qualitative method with a phenomenological approach, and uses purposive sampling data collection through observation, interviews, and documentation. The results of this study show that the process of student identity construction begins when a perception of OOTD such as up to date, fashionable, prestige, elegant is obtained through virtual and social environments which are then compared with previously inherent identity standards. Furthermore, the comparator sends a signal of incompatibility between the incoming perceptions and the identity standards held, so this has implications for impulse buying activities.

1874-1875: The Birth of a Fashion Heritage Consciousness in France

The first exhibition about the history of costume, the “Musée historique du costume” was inaugurated in France in 1874. One year later, the historian and archaeologist Jules Quicherat (1814-1882) published the first popular book about French dress history, l'Histoire du costume en France depuis les temps reculés jusqu'à nos jours (Hachette, 1875). The exhibition and the book were immensely popular. This article seeks to understand the nascent interest in the material culture of fashion that they both revealed. A closer examination of how the organizers chose to display the objects in the “Musée historique du costume”, as well as the way they instructed the visitor to see what was in the exhibition, reveals the very first institutional framework for public interaction with historical fashion objects. The analysis of the Histoire du costume, and in particular a careful examination of the method used by Quicherat, shows how Quicherat succeeded in integrating fashion objects as sources into a larger historic narrative.

Bimodal alteration of cognitive accuracy for spintronic artificial neural networks.

Spintronics-based artificial neural networks (ANNs) exhibiting nonvolatile, fast, and energy-efficient computing capabilities are promising neuromorphic hardware for performing complex cognitive tasks of artificial intelligence and machine learning. Early experimental efforts focused on multistate device concepts to enhance synaptic weight precisions, albeit compromising on cognitive accuracy due to their low magnetoresistance. Here, we propose a hybrid approach based on the tuning of tunnel magnetoresistance (TMR) and the number of states in the compound magnetic tunnel junctions (MTJs) to improve the cognitive performance of an all-spin ANN. A TMR variation of 33-78% is controlled by the free layer (FL) thickness wedge (1.6-2.6 nm) across the wafer. Meanwhile, the number of resistance states in the compound MTJ is manipulated by varying the number of constituent MTJ cells (n = 1-3), generating n + 1 states with a TMR difference between consecutive states of at least 21%. Using MNIST handwritten digit and fashion object databases, the test accuracy of the compound MTJ ANN is observed to increase with the number of intermediate states for a fixed FL thickness or TMR. Meanwhile, the test accuracy for a 1-cell MTJ increases linearly by 8.3% and 7.4% for handwritten digits and fashion objects, respectively, with increasing TMR. Interestingly, a multifarious TMR dependence of test accuracy is observed with the increasing synaptic complexity in the 2- and 3-cell MTJs. By leveraging on the bimodal tuning of multilevel and TMR, we establish viable paths for enhancing the cognitive performance of spintronic ANN for in-memory and neuromorphic computing.

The Influence of Brand Satisfaction and Luxury Brand Attachment on Customer Advocacy Through Brand Loyalty on Zalora Marketplace

This study is an exploratory study where researchers try to measure the influence of luxury brand fashion objects during the Covid-19 pandemic. The pursose of this research is to produce an overview of the marketing strategy for the online store Zalora Indonesia which sells luxury fashion brands, in an efffort to face very tight competition in the market in Indonesio and to recover after being affected by the Coved-19 pandemic by measuring the magnitude of the influence of brand satisfaction, luxury brand attachment, and brand loyalty on customer advocacy. The respondents in this study were 150 who were customers of luxury fashion brands in Zalora Indonesia who had made a purchase at least once. Non-probablity sampling is the sampling technique, and purposive sampling is the sampling method. The results show that luxury brand attachments have an influence on brand loyalty, and will increase customer advocacy. The practical implication of this research is that Zalora Indonesia, which sells luxury goods, can increase customer advocacy for online purchases through Zalora Indonesia.

3D Adversarial Augmentations for Robust Out-of-Domain Predictions

Since real-world training datasets cannot properly sample the long tail of the underlying data distribution, corner cases and rare out-of-domain samples can severely hinder the performance of state-of-the-art models. This problem becomes even more severe for dense tasks, such as 3D semantic segmentation, where points of non-standard objects can be confidently associated to the wrong class. In this work, we focus on improving the generalization to out-of-domain data. We achieve this by augmenting the training set with adversarial examples. First, we learn a set of vectors that deform the objects in an adversarial fashion. To prevent the adversarial examples from being too far from the existing data distribution, we preserve their plausibility through a series of constraints, ensuring sensor-awareness and shapes smoothness. Then, we perform adversarial augmentation by applying the learned sample-independent vectors to the available objects when training a model. We conduct extensive experiments across a variety of scenarios on data from KITTI, Waymo, and CrashD for 3D object detection, and on data from SemanticKITTI, Waymo, and nuScenes for 3D semantic segmentation. Despite training on a standard single dataset, our approach substantially improves the robustness and generalization of both 3D object detection and 3D semantic segmentation methods to out-of-domain data.

Mourning jewelry in late Georgian and Victorian Britain

Mourning or memorial jewelry constituted one of the most emblematic traditions of death rituals in the cultural history of Great Britain since medieval times and even earlier. They symbolized the power of the human mind and soul to face death, to honor the memory of the dead and to keep it alive and intact in time and during the great challenges of life. Since the end of the eighteenth century and during the long nineteenth century, in addition to being indicative values of the cultural and social development of the English people, they constituted symbols that defined the concept of social order. They also became important fashion objects as they represented thoroughly the royal court mood and reflected its preferences, temper and taste. This research focuses on the importance of different types and symbolism of mourning jewelry in late Georgian and mid to late Victorian Britain. Through the magnifier of the historical, cultural, artistic and technological changes of the time the author examines and comments on the roles of the royal court and mainly on Queen Victoria’s personality in enhancing and even reshaping the idea of mourning customs within which Memento Mori and memorial jewelry thrived.

From Secondhand to Invisible Hand: Methods of Manipulating Object Biographies on The Realreal Online Marketplace

This article analyzes the methods employed to ensure the conservation of the value of goods sold on The RealReal online marketplace, a new-generation secondhand fashion reseller associated with the “circular economy.” First, we map challenges that The RealReal needs to overcome in order to enable fashion objects to come back onto the market. Next, based on a mixed methodology research, we detail the methods being used by the reseller to address these issues and analyze their effect. We argue that these methods interfere with the cultural biography of the objects being sold and present The RealReal as an authority in certifying the authenticity of a fashion object, although it has no official or practical ability to do so. By achieving this position, The RealReal forms a connection between the original brand and The RealReal’s own end customer. This connection is used to highlight the branded value of the objects, and at the same time to obscure the traces of previous ownership, to deflect attention from the fact that the inventory is mostly secondhand. We conclude that by doing so, the reseller has come up with a formula that enables fashion objects to take part in the circular economy.

Memories reminisced, reconciled, renewed: Hong Kong male consumers’ wardrobes and their search for a congruent self

Previous research on fashion, clothing and accessorising practices typically stressed either the symbolic and identity-creating or practical and habitual functions of fashion, often neglecting its affective, emotive and mnemonic aspects. Drawing on affective theory and the agency of things, we theorise how the affects, feelings and emotions attached to active and inactive fashion objects evoke and are evoked by the consumer’s ongoing reminiscence, reconciliation, and renewal of memories. Remapping the intricate relationship among consumers, memory, affect, and fashion objects, this article employs wardrobe study interviews to reconceptualise the clothing consumption, storage and disposal practices of male fashion consumers in Hong Kong and their trans-temporal self-memory-object relationships. Interviewing 21 gay male participants while physically going through their wardrobes together reveals the mnemonic abilities of clothes and accessories to bring up the past, their functioning as emotive devices, and the process of how affective, unpatterned feelings and sensations are reminisced, reconciled and renewed through fashion. These unique theoretical and methodological approaches make it possible to delve deeper into consumers’ intimate material and sensual relationships with clothing and accessory items, which are often used to make sense of incongruent memories and future fantasies, also enabling their ongoing mediation of unresolved affective experiences and curation of a linear cultural script of personal development.

Automated electrokinetic stretcher for manipulating nanomaterials.

In this work, we present an automated platform for trapping and stretching individual micro- and nanoscale objects in solution using electrokinetic forces. The platform can trap objects at the stagnation point of a planar elongational electrokinetic field for long time scales, as demonstrated by the trapping of <100 nm polystyrene beads and DNA molecules for minutes, with a standard deviation in displacement from the trap center <1 μm. This capability enables the stretching of deformable nanoscale objects in a high-throughput fashion, as illustrated by the stretching of more than 400 DNA molecules within ∼4 hours. The flexibility of the electrokinetic stretcher opens up numerous possibilities for complex manipulation, with sequential stretching of a molecule at different voltages and multiple stretch-relaxation cycles of the same molecule as examples. The platform described provides an automated, high-throughput method to track and manipulate objects for real-time studies of micro- and nanoscale systems.

The Per(ver)formative Aspects of Pandemic Fashion Performances: Moschino’s Deconstructive Marionettes

Abstract It is said that due to the social and economic effects of the recent pandemic, fashion has been caught in a destructive position. One aspect is the material change of the fashion objects and the strong pre-eminence of the so-called “stay-at-home collections” against the earlier dominance of the ready-to-wear and haute couture garments intended for social events. An important feature of recent fashion changes is their reliance on current pandemic rules and the related political decisions. In my presentation, I will focus on an interesting example of these pandemic changes: Moschino’s 2021 Spring/Summer Collection. Moschino’s “Marionette Performance” is a perfect example for infelicitous performativity where the show is created in a per(ver)formative (in the Derridean sense) act in the catwalk space. I intend to show that performativity is broken at every step of the show. In this spring collection, not only are the mannequins substituted by dolls but the viewers – some are well known (e.g. Anna Wintour) – are also transformed into marionettes by Jeremy Scott. With a self-ironic gesture, anyone of us from the possible audience can be changed into a puppet. To analyse the performative character of the show, I use deconstructive approaches and ideas. I wish to emphasize the interweaving performative dimensions that, in a sense, preclude each other with the help of Paul de Man’s interpretation of Kleist’s Über das Marionettentheater. I want to point out the mechanical, meaningless materiality appearing in the marionettes’ movements on Moschino’s special catwalk. My lecture argues that in the movements of the marionettes the possibility of the clear manifestation of performativity becomes uncertain.

Fashion’s Borders

Abstract The introduction traces the long history of fashion’s movement across cultural, national, and political borders. After brief case studies of early twentieth-century French and Spanish styles imagining fashion as an engine of transnational amity, the introduction highlights how fashion navigates some of the most troubled borders of recent years, including the conflict between Russia and Ukraine and racial violence. Fashion forces viewers and consumers to choose sides, whether through national identification or through recognition of the long history of black and brown bodies producing fashionable objects. To advance the global history of fashion, the introduction briefly discusses the work of designers Rawan Maki (Bahrain), Laurence Leenaert (Belgium), and Kim Jones (Great Britain), examining how each upends gender, race, class, or fashion binaries, and analyzes how LVMH and Uniqlo, brands at opposite ends of the contemporary style spectrum, underline the very different ways in which fashion traverses the globe in the twenty-first century. The introduction concludes with the hope that this issue will raise questions about fashion’s articulation of the relation among the local, the national, and the global, as well as about the human experience of interacting with the fashion industry in one national context while living in a globalized world.

A Tale of Color Variants: Representation and Self-Supervised Learning in Fashion E-commerce

In this paper, we address a crucial problem in fashion e-commerce (with respect to customer experience, as well as revenue): color variants identification, i.e., identifying fashion products that match exactly in their design (or style), but only to differ in their color. We propose a generic framework, that leverages deep visual Representation Learning at its heart, to address this problem for our fashion e-commerce platform. Our framework could be trained with supervisory signals in the form of triplets, that are obtained manually. However, it is infeasible to obtain manual annotations for the entire huge collection of data usually present in fashion e-commerce platforms, such as ours, while capturing all the difficult corner cases. But, to our rescue, interestingly we observed that this crucial problem in fashion e-commerce could also be solved by simple color jitter based image augmentation, that recently became widely popular in the contrastive Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) literature, that seeks to learn visual representations without using manual labels. This naturally led to a question in our mind: Could we leverage SSL in our use-case, and still obtain comparable performance to our supervised framework? The answer is, Yes! because, color variant fashion objects are nothing but manifestations of a style, in different colors, and a model trained to be invariant to the color (with, or without supervision), should be able to recognize this! This is what the paper further demonstrates, both qualitatively, and quantitatively, while evaluating a couple of state-of-the-art SSL techniques, and also proposing a novel method.

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?

The affect of fashion: An exploration of affective method

Fashion enchants, engrosses, caresses, itches, restrains, liberates, enfolds, reveals, protects and provokes. This article researches fashion’s ability to affect, and vice versa, how humans are affected by fashion. The first part introduces the main tenets of affect theory, while the second part of the article focuses on the pragmatics of affective method. We understand affect as both an autonomous force and a neurobiological bodily response to a trigger that offsets feelings and emotions. To practically engage with affective experiences and the bodily sensations, feelings and emotions they evoke, we use Laura U. Marks’s affective analysis as a a method. We describe our experiments with this affective method using two case studies: a couture dress designed by Dutch fashion designer Jan Taminiau and a simple T-shirt produced by fast fashion giant Primark. The case studies illustrate the affective qualities of fashion by researching embodied responses, feelings and emotions. The affective method aims to circumvent representation by focusing on the body and how it relates to what fashion can ‘do’. It also allows for a sustained focus on the materiality of the fashion object itself. The article argues that affective method is a valuable and compelling tool that can break open material fashion research, by foregrounding the embodied experiences, feelings and emotions that play a key role in our relationship with fashion.

Repair of Fashion Objects: An Interview with Sarah Scaturro

Fashion conservation practices could overlap with sustainable fashion design methods in some instances, and one of the most prominent upcycling methods, "repair," is such an example. Sustaining the longevity of garments and repairing the damages to give multiple lives to a garment is a common intent for both practices, yet, the interventions and manifestations of repair could be opposite intentions. This interview with Sarah Scaturro reflects her experiences of repairing fashion objects from both worlds of fashion, inside the museum where delicate skills and in-depth knowledge are required, and outside where imperfections and practical applications are received well. This paper suggests that a garment’s meanings deepen and change as the conservator interacts with each object for a long time, creating diverse memories. Fashion conservatory practices are similar to the Bergsonian sense of time, where fashion garments mean more than a temporal object whose duration, time, and memory are involved in every detail of the process. Thus, the perceptions about the fashion objects differ, and the decisions do not necessarily follow a linear path.

Fattening fabulousness: the joys and risks of troubling gender through fat fashion

ABSTRACT Gender and weight are produced through dress before a child comes into the world. But dressing the body in ways that produce and embody one’s own understanding of gender is challenging for fat bodies because they have limited or no choice of available clothing sizes and styles. As a result, finding clothes that produce and embody fat people’s desired gender identities and expressions tends to be a source of struggle. This article tells a different story. Drawing on interviews and participatory photography, we use madison moore’s theory of “fabulousness” to explore how six fat, curvy and thick-identified people of diverse gender and fat embodiments create their gender and fat identities through their favorite fashion object. We also explore how participatory photography allows our participants and research team to co-create new understandings of fat, gender and fashion. Our work centers participants’ pleasure from finding and wearing clothing that produces and embodies their desired gender and fat identities, but participants also share how risk is inescapable when they dress their bodies in their favorite pieces in the social world. We argue that our participants practice “fabulousness” because their embodied dressing leads them to experience both pleasure and risk by stretching dominant understandings of gender and fat. Our findings contribute to fat studies and fashion studies by introducing underrepresented experiences of gender and weight, demonstrating how participatory photography generates more layered understandings of gender, fat and embodied dressing, and revealing the possibilities of fabulousness to connect both fields.

Fashion You Do Not Own, Fashion You Cannot Feel: Toward a New Paradigm of Sharing Fashion in the Digital Age

This paper explores the implications of contemporary sharing—a central cultural activity in the twenty-first century related to social media, the shared economy and ways of communication—on fashion. First, it maps the connection between fashion, body and personality. Later, following a theoretical model presented by John, it argues that sharing and fashion are internally connected and that sharing is the driving force behind the appearance of new consumer concepts such rental services and digital collections. Finally, the article analyzes these services to demonstrate how they disrupt the historical relationship between subjects and fashion objects in terms of ownership, physical connection and speed of circulation. It arises from this that in fashion, where the object used to be owned or literally attached to the body, and is part of a constructed personality, sharing is motivating a radical shift in the bond connecting subjects and clothes.