Iconic Fashion Research Articles

Follow Fashion: Patrick Kelly, Derrick Adams & AfroQueer Commutation

Conceptually polyamorous and resolute in its genre bending, this article weaves together fashion, visual art, and reflexivity. The warp and weft of the resulting Afroqueer tapestry are iconic fashion designer Patrick Kelly and multi-media visual and performance artist Derrick Adams, but I thread my own fashion fascination story through an unfurling of Adams’ deconstructed meditation on the patterns of Kelly’s legacy. Unraveling the sewn lessons of ancestry, artistry and NYC Subway asociality, this itinerant commute investigates the various stations where African American fashion, art, and queerness (in its most capacious sense) connect. Rush to make this train, fish the matte black crochet hooks and iridescent black yarn out of your Telfar bag, and please stand clear the closing doors.

Knitting masculinities: How men are challenging masculinity and needlework in a post-pandemic age

The JW Anderson patchwork cardigan from the spring/summer 2020 menswear collection has become an iconic fashion item during the COVID-19 pandemic. Worn by Harry Styles, the cardigan inspired a worldwide TikTok trend of crafting and DIY-ing a replica at home with over 90 million views to date. In response, JW Anderson published the pattern online and the V&A museum acquired the knitwear for its permanent collection. One year later, Olympic gold medallist Tom Daley was pictured knitting in the stands at the 2020 Olympic games – a craft he had picked up during the lockdowns. Both instances are challenging the notion of knitting and needlework as a feminine craft. In the past, men who embroidered, knitted or sewed their clothes were designated as infantile, effeminate and deviant from the hetero masculine norm. In today’s post-pandemic climate, these associations are being challenged. Taking the cardigan and the resurgence of needlework as a case study, this article investigates the ways the COVID-19 pandemic influenced contemporary fashion consumption and re-stitched the meaning of male knitting. Focusing on the transformative aspects of slow fashion and gender fluidity in contemporary society, this article draws on a theoretical framework deriving from queer theory and sustainable fashion. Coined by Kate Fletcher, slow fashion encompasses a recalibration towards a focus on high-quality items over quantity and a slower production that does not exploit natural and human resources. Judith Butler’s notion of gender performativity exposes gender as a social construct produced and maintained by a stylized repetition of acts, such as commonplace speech or nonverbal communication. Analysing the resurgence of male needlework through this critical lens, this article argues that it is the result of seismographic shifts within the contemporary fashion and popular culture that have been accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Disrupting the fashion industry profoundly on a global scale, this article discusses how the pandemic can be seen as a catalyst for fashion in renegotiating masculinities.

New MH coalition featuring storytelling platform launches

Leading mental health organizations, advocates and celebrities have launched a coalition to destigmatize mental health conditions and address the pervasive public health crisis. The new effort was announced in a May 15 news release by the coalition's founder, social activist and iconic fashion designer Kenneth Cole.

Monetizing Hijab: Analysis on State’s National Interest on the Growing Hijab Fashion Trend in Indonesia

Hijab and its practices grow consistently as an iconic fashion of Muslim women in Indonesia. This phenomenon yields scholarly commentaries pertaining to the motivation of hijab’s massive production and Muslim women in veiling as well as the socioeconomic impact it carries with. However, the discussion on what sources of power underlie such a trend is still underrated. Therefore, this study aims at elucidating why now hijab receives greater support from the government under Joko Widodo’s administration that illuminates massive production and consumption on hijab domestically. The analyst came to argue that hijab consumption and production has become Indonesia’s national interest along with the mushrooming liberalization in its economy. Employing the qualitative research method to explain the source of power that makes hijab marketable in global and national market, the analyst also found that this trend is widely undermined by the implementation of neo-liberal economic policy that stresses the power of economic liberation of every individual while maintaining the state as the ultimate power of directing economic trajectory. Thus, the government of Indonesia seems to reconcile with the increasing domestic and global market demand on hijab. It is due to the state’s interest in establishing Indonesia as a global hijab centre by 2020.

Decoding Gestural Iconicity.

Speakers frequently perform representational gestures to depict concepts in an iconic fashion. For example, a speaker may hold her index finger and thumb apart to indicate the size of a matchstick. However, the process by which a physical handshape is mentally transformed into abstract spatial information is not well understood. We present a series of experiments that investigate how people decode the physical form of an articulator to derive imaginary geometrical constructs, which we call "gesture form." We provide quantitative evidence for several key properties that play a role in this process. First, "profiling," the ability to focus on a structural subunit within the complex form of the physical hand. Second, "perspective," for which we show that one and the same handshape seen from different perspectives can lead to different spatial interpretations. Third, "selectivity," the fact that gestures focus on specific spatial features at the expense of others. Our results provide a first step toward mapping out the process of how representational gestures make the communication of spatial information possible.

Dump it out! An enquiry into consumers’ everyday fashion discourses through handbag

Abstract Handbag is an iconic fashion accessory in our material culture. Following the tradition of representational thinking, this article introduces the handbag as an epistemic consumption object through which to investigate consumer experiences, practices and identity construction in relation to everyday lived discourses. The handbag research involves an examination of participants’ personal belongings inside their bags together with phenomenological interviews concerning the associated subjective experiences along with these material objects. We demonstrate how these material possessions become the subject of the research that facilitates multiple conversations between researchers and participants as to introspect, evaluate and interpret the significance of symbolic consumption in their everyday life. This study contributes to proposing a systematic way of employing interpretive research methodology in the studies of material culture; in addition, this study on the handbag can act as an inspiration for others in identifying emerging themes and topics into symbolism in popular culture.

How Fashion Designers Develop New Styles:Creative Epiphany Versus Market Feedback

Iconic fashion designers see themselves as artistic visionaries whose creations are impervious to market critique. Using real- world data, this work refutes this notion, and is the first empirical study to document a market response model of fashion. We show empirically how elite European fashion houses introduce new styles based on how previous styles have been received by the market. More specifically, we find designers introduce styles that are more similar to styles that were successful in the past and less similar to styles that were less well-received. Further, the styles a designer introduces are shown to depend on the market’s response to competing designers’ styles. In showing how styles evolve systematically over time, this work illustrates the systematic integration of market feedback on new product introductions, doing so in an industry based on aesthetic innovation.

A Study on the Legal Protection of Fashion Design: Comparison between Korea and the United States

The global fashion industry produces a huge variety of creative goods to market. The fashion industry profits by developing creative content as in the music, film, video game, and book industries. However, unlike those industries, the fashion industry’s principal creative production lies outside the domain of intellectual property law. Fashion has not been historically protected by copyright law due to differences in the legal treatment of the fine arts, like literature, music, and art, which are accorded copyright protection, and crafts, which are generally not accorded such protection. Although fashion is meant to be functional (i.e., it must fit the human body and keep it warm and dry), it is also artistic and creative. Most would agree that fashion is rarely a fine art because it also fulfills a utilitarian function, but this should not necessarily preclude designers from being able to protect their investment in truly innovative designs, as artists and musicians are able to do. The law has traditionally treated each field of IP as an instance of discrete and mutually exclusive protection. Patents protect innovation in terms of functional design, while copyrights protect artistic expression. Finally, trademarks protect goodwill and reputation. These firm divisions between patentable and copyrightable subject matter have left the creative designers of utilitarian objects such as clothing without protection. The growth of the fashion industry has spawned an increased public awareness about fashionable designer products. In light of the popularity of certain designers or specific designs, design piracy has increased exponentially. Design piracy is the copying of a designer’s original designs, thereby enjoying the benefit of his/her artistic work at no expense. Copyists can thus free ride on the efforts of designers, thereby discouraging future investments in creative fashion design. Design piracy is not new; however, while it once took several years for a fashion to descend the price line into low-priced production, this progression is now nearly immediate. Technological advances have made it possible for design pirates to obtain another creator’s designs and manufacture duplicates overnight. Because of the pervasiveness of design piracy, the practice of copying is now considered commonplace in the fashion industry. Accordingly, the original designers of iconic fashion pieces stand to lose substantial amounts of revenue after expending the capital necessary to create them. This study compares Korea and the United States to understand the implications of Korea’s fashion design protections. This paper describes the research on fashion design protection practices in both countries, analyzes the present situation state of fashion design protection in these countries, and compares their legal principles related to fashion design protection. To this end, a literature review is presented that draws on relevant studies and national statistical data on both countries. First, the research on Korea and U.S. fashion design piracy can be summarized as follows. For fashion design in Korea, previous studies focus on the current status of counterfeit fashion goods, intellectual property protection in the fashion market and the protection of applied arts including fashion design. However, these studies have some limitations; many lack specific, concrete discussion on the current status of intellectual property and protection methods, instead providing general, comprehensive discussions. In contrast, studies in the U.S. context focus on the present situation of counterfeit goods in the fashion market, the nature of the fashion market, the essential features of design piracy and the legal protection of fashion design under the Design Piracy Prohibition Act. The breadth of studies on U.S. design piracy studies is much wider compared to those on Korea. In particular, as bills regarding the protection of design under copyright law such as DPPA or IDPPA are submitted to Congress, studies on the protection of design under legal laws are actively conducted. Fashion design protection in Korea versus the United States and the relevant legal principles can be summarized as follows. There are similarities and differences in the protection of fashion design across both countries. First, both countries are similar in terms of fashion design protection under patent law. Both countries provide some protection for fashion design under copyright law. Fashion design still lacks the criteria that have been established for literary works, but criteria are being developed to facilitate the protection of fashion design under copyright law. The most significant difference between the two countries regarding the protection of fashion design lies in the political efforts undertaken to protect fashion design. Unlike Korea, the United States has continued to enforce a separate law for the practical protection of fashion design to address two problems: first, the screening process generally takes a long time, which hinders the protection of fashion, and second, it is difficult to protect the middle area of design rights.

Barack Obama, the 2008 Presidential Election, and the New Cosmopolitanism: Figuring the Black Body

On July 24, 2008, a new American presidential candidate--one whose personal background has been attacked by some as rather than sufficiently American (or even adequately black American)--declared in Berlin, speak ... as a fellow citizen of the (Obama, Berlin). In order to recall President John F. Kennedy's 1963 trip to West Berlin and to signify on Kennedy's declaration Ich bin ein Berliner, Barack Obama used a phrase commonly attributed to ancient philosopher, Diogenes of Sinope. At the same time, his words resonated with a well-known 1967 speech by Martin Luther King, Jr., who announced at New York's Riverside Church, speak as a citizen of the (Beyond 153). Obama's reiteration of ancient credo comes at a time when some, such as Ulrich Beck, have asserted, reality itself has become (287). On a structural scale, people live in a world of escalating international circulation, including the circulation of ideas, products, people, and capital. To quote Obama, ours is an era of globalization and dizzying technological change (Audacity 10). In addition to new information and transportation technologies, new transnational labor and immigration patterns have altered the conditions of life in the United States and around the world. Recent events have forcefully demonstrated that the economies of individual nations are increasingly linked to those of others. As presidential candidate Obama's claim to world citizenship in Berlin and his complicated personal history and ancestry suggest, the 44th president of the United States seems uniquely positioned to represent in iconic fashion this new state of affairs. Obama's physical embodiment of what might be called cosmopolitan blackness also contributes to a current debate over the promises and dangers of a revitalized social ethic. Since the mid 1990s (a time period that overlaps with the publication of Obama's 1995 Dreams from My Father), a number of black and white intellectuals, cultural critics, literary scholars, sociologists, and philosophers have demonstrated interest in revising older theories of ethical cosmopolitanism, or the recognition of shared human rights, in ways that will make it more responsive to local bonds and affiliations. Current theorists of cosmopolitanism have been especially interested in exploring its complex relationships to nationalism, ethnicity, and cultural hybridity through the consideration of so-called vernacular, already existing, and discrepant cosmopolitanism. (1) The current attempt to recuperate a ethic after the postmodemist rejection of universals and after the post-Civil Rights concentration on identity politics has centered on the question of whether a revitalized appeal to universal human rights can provide a basis for progressive social reform, or whether it simply promotes abstract loyalties at the expense of existing ethnic, geographical, and national communities. What does examination of the social meanings attributed to the raced body of the American president, who has recently been called one of the most photographed men in the world today (Newly), contribute to these debates? What does it mean when Obama positions himself as embodiment of democratic and values in his speeches and his writing? What notion of citizenship--of personal, national, and international identities--might such claims entail? To answer these questions, I first examine several social meanings that were attributed to Obama's body by the American public during the 2008 campaign, especially as they were represented in widely circulated photographs and images. An examination of the political representations of Obama reveals the degree to which the candidate's body became a contested site for competing conceptions of citizenship, ethnicity, and nation. Second, I analyze Obama's own reading of his body as incarnation of values, drawing largely upon his speeches. …

Politics, Process & (Jazz) Performance: Amiri Baraka's "It's Nation Time"

Politics In a recently published book, Baraka: The Politics and Art of a Black Intellectual, the scholar Jerry Watts invokes Baraka in iconic fashion. He prefaces the book with the following admonition: In the best of worlds, it would be unwise to call out the name Baraka in a crowded hall of black intellectuals. To bring up Baraka in a symposium on art and politics is to bring a conversation to a standstill. of the most controversial Afro-American intellectuals of the last forty years, Baraka is admired, hated, feared, dismissed, adored, and despised. (x) The recent broil over Baraka's recital of the poem Somebody Blew Up America has only served to intensify the poet's controversial status. With calls by some state and local officials to force Baraka to resign from his post as New Jersey's poet laureate, one could add to Watts's alliterative list of verbs the darkly descriptive dethroned. But Watts's perspective on Baraka's position as an intellectual is of lesser relevance, for this essay's purposes, than is Watts's position on Baraka's poetry. Of his second poetry collection, Nation Watts opines: None of the three poems [in the book] is impressive. The redundancy and tendentiousness of the themes make it appear as if Baraka had run out of ideas.... [He] may have done himself a disservice in trying to force his strong polemical impulses into a poetic form. His didactic intentions overwhelm his artistic sensibilities and make the poetry abysmal (236-37) Watts diametrically opposes the polemic and didactic to the artistic and the poetic, rendering Baraka's form as distinctly separate from--instead of an extension of--verbal content. Watts's critique highlights the time-worn division drawn between art and politics (as opposed to art as politics), and his method for critical analysis entails focusing on the semantic substance of the poems on the page. Thus, he disregards the poems' formal structure and the performance environment in which they emerged and through which Baraka planned to articulate them. This neglect of the potential presentation context leads to what might seem to some to be a well-founded dismissal of Baraka's poetry, especially penned during his prolific outpouring in the 1970s such as Nation Time. Ironically, Watts's censure of It's Nation Time, and concurrently Baraka's poetics, occurs in the same chapter, Amiri Baraka as Black Arts Poet and Essayist, which readily acknowledges, first, Baraka's talent and popularity a a performance artist, particularly during the Black Arts Movement (BAM), and, second, the importance of performance (poetry and drama were the favored genres of Movement participants) as one of the political strategies Baraka and other Black Arts artists employed to reach a black mass audience. Indeed, Watts proclaims, One had to hear Baraka in order to experience the Imamu, or spiritual leader (237). Yet Watts's inattention to the dynamic effects of Baraka's speaking voice when he recites his poetry amounts to a mishearing and, consequently, a misreading of his corpus. More specifically, I contend that, through the arena of performance, a dimension of Baraka's poetics emerges that counters a one-dimensional interpretation of his poetry as appallingly flattened by his poet cal motivations. As the poet and critic Charles Bernstein justly observes, ... performance, in the sense of doing, is an underlying formal aesthetic as much as it is a political issue in Baraka's work (7). If a primarily page-based analysis of Baraka's poetics leads to its underestimation, then a formal audio and visual analysis of Baraka's poetry-in-performance can potentially enrich our appreciation of his poetics. As this essay will demonstrate, Baraka's additions to and alterations c verses, his shifts from speech into song, and his imitations of the sounds of instruments while performing his poems all suggest that, in a performance context, his engages in a process of revision modeled upon the improvisatory ethos of jazz. …

The basis of hemispheric asymmetries for language and spatial cognition: Clues from focal brain damage in two deaf native signers

Abstract The existence of hemispheric asymmetries for language processing and visuospatial processing is well established. In this report we investigate the basis of these asymmetries through the window of American Sign Language (ASL). ASL uses spatial contrasts to encode grammatical information at all levels of representation, including phonology, morphology, and syntax. In addition, however, ASL uses space in an iconic fashion to represent spatial information directly, as, for example, in describing the layout of objects in a room. We tested the performance of two deaf, native signers—one with left hemisphere damage (LHD) and one with right hemisphere damage (RHD)—on tasks involving the use of space, within ASL, to represent linguistic versus spatial information. We found a double dissociation: the LHD signer was impaired on tasks involving the use of space for encoding grammatical information, but performed well on tasks involving the use of space to encode spatial information iconically; the RHD signe...

Olhar testemunhal e representação da ação na fotografia

Propomos, neste texto, uma análise dos aspectos codificados do gesto humano capturado na fotografia: tomando especificamente o caso do embargo visual das ações no fotojornalismo contemporâneo, examinaremos o modo como os princípios da representação pictórica de situações narrativas estrutura o discurso visual da fotografia de ações. Tomando partido das idéias de Gombrich sobre os princípios da representação pictórica das atitudes humanas, identificamos o gesto humano capturado na fotografia como estando cindido entre dois aspectos principais de sua codificação: no plano de sua ritualização (a normalização dos gestos tendo por modelo suas funções retóricas), ou por referência aos aspectos expressionais da representação do gesto humano (ou seja, pela geração de um pathos, modelado no nível da iconicidade da imagem) isto é, pela produção de uma simaptia sensorial da imagem com aspectos da experiência das personagens da cena.