Transnational Fashion Research Articles

Consuming and retailing fashion: South Asian diaspora negotiating clothing practices, identities and community making in Glasgow

ABSTRACT This article explores South Asian diasporic fashion retail spaces and sartorial practices in Glasgow. Drawing on ten months of ethnographic research, it investigates how fashion and clothing contribute to identity construction, community building, and cultural blending among British South Asians. Utilising patchwork ethnography and city walking, the article presents the lived experiences of shopkeepers and consumers, demonstrating the interplay of gender, migration, spaces, and religion in sartorial practices. The findings reveal that fashion and sartorial practices are not merely about personal expression but also about negotiating hybrid and multiple identities and fostering community solidarity amidst the challenges of migration and cultural preservation. The article also contributes to the broader discourse on transnational fashion, advocating for a decolonial perspective that addresses ethical, moral, and environmental sustainability within diverse fashion systems.

Decentralizing the power of fashion? Exploring the geographies and inter-place connections of fashion cities through fashion weeks

ABSTRACT While the relationship between fashion and cities has been repeatedly discussed, there has been little structural analysis of the geographies of fashion cities across the world. This article presents an exploratory study of the geographical patterns, cultural presentation, and inter-place connections of fashion cities by examining a pivotal event in the fashion industry, fashion weeks. Our study uncovers the unbalanced and shifting power structure of contemporary fashion cities, which indicates the restructuring of the global fashion industry. It also reveals the complex interaction between local, national, and transnational culture in the making of fashion cities. Compared to their economic dimensions, the cultural functions of cities are more deeply embedded in the consumption and production bases of national economies. Therefore, fashion cities are not merely bases for the circulation of transnational fashion capital but also important places for local fashion producers to create and distribute their unique cultural genres.

Critical Tasks in the Buyer-Driven Postponement of Fashion Buyers

We consider the postponement strategy of transnational fashion buyers, showing aggressive investment in embedding big data analytics and active engagement in managing quick response third-world contractors. Based on a two-stage multi-product newsvendor model, we show that such two strategic behaviors of fashion buyers allow them to reduce their committed orders with contractors, resulting in a complementary effect. Thus, such initiatives should be implemented simultaneously as the critical tasks for transnational fashion buyers to improve their in-season reactivity. Next, from the operational level, our results show that the conventional wisdom of risk-pooling suited for producer-driven supply chains is not valid if the buyers can manage the cost of delayed orders effectively. Otherwise, their benefit is insignificant even though they may need to follow the conventional wisdom. In the presence of restricted chances to reduce costs of delayed orders in practice, such results indicate that reducing options and complexity in the assortment plan for intelligent management of the costs correspond to another critical task for fashion buyers with the recent trend of fabric consolidation and material platforming.

Critiques of Appropriation and Transnational Labor Ethics

Ideas and concepts have their own lives and resilience, to which one should be sensitive. This article focuses on the ways in which a group of Indian artisan organizations and collectives deploy—in their critical exchange with a designer and retailer that have privileged access to the transnationally circulating capital—the concept of appropriation as a tool to confront the hierarchical divisions of labor, and the unequal distribution of capital, within the globalized circuits of transnational fashion production. In bringing together Karl Marx’s critique of the appropriation of living labor by objectified labor and David Harvey’s critical exposé of the new mechanisms of “accumulation by dispossession,” and connecting these labor-focused perspectives on appropriation to the phenomenon of so-called cultural appropriation, the following investigates the potentiality of appropriation in facilitating a transnational labor ethics that defies the problematic segregation of the “design” and “creative” processes from the increasingly alienated and absorbed productive forces of the dispossessed artisan and craft communities.

Transnational Fashion Sustainability: Between and Across the Gulf and the UK

In this moment of ecological crisis, the consequences of crisis are unevenly distributed, with those with the least power impacted the most. The fashion industry’s growth, spurred in the past decades by fast fashion and a reliance on growth of petroleum-based fibers, is a contributor to this uneven distribution of ecological consequences. This paper explores fashion and ecology as interconnected transnational systems. It does this with reference to two contexts: the UK and the Gulf state of Bahrain. By exploring positions on environmentalism in the UK and Bahrain, questions around fibers, clothing care and waste, this paper underscores the political urgency and the relational effects of change that span nation states within the fashion sector. Decarbonizing the fashion system requires both localized action and methodologies in addition to political will to work between and across such themes. Transnational perspectives are central to cumulative whole-systems effects.

The ‘Return of Beauty’? The politics of restitution of Nazi-looted art in Italy, the Federal Republic of Germany and Austria, 1945-1998

ABSTRACT This article examines how cultural restitution was presented and debated in public discourses in the three main post-fascist countries of Western Europe, i.e. Austria, Italy and (West) Germany, from the end of the Second World War to the 1998 signing of the ‘Washington Declaration on Nazi-confiscated Art’. The study focuses on the role played by restitution in the process of memory-building vis-à-vis the development of these three countries’ Vergangenheitsbewältigung, their ‘struggling to cope with the past’. In particular, it examines the transition from a mild Vergangenheitspolitik, ‘the politics of the past’, typical of the early post-war period, to later attempts at a more fully fledged Vergangenheitsbewältigung that characterized the détente and especially the post-Cold War years. Building on a selection of Austrian, British, German, Italian and US printed primary sources, the paper investigates in comparative and transnational fashion how liberal-democratic narratives surrounding the three countries’ dictatorial past were constructed in order to tackle one central question: what role did cultural restitution play in the construction of post-war memory politics, and, vice versa, how did the memory and legacy of fascism impact restitution debates during and after the Cold War? Far from constituting a mere exercise in cultural diplomacy, the restitution of cultural property played an integral role in these three countries’ attempts at rebuilding a sense of national cohesion designed to overcome the ghosts of their fascist past. This often happened at the expense of an in-depth processing of their involvement in the Holocaust. Indeed, restitution came to perform a central function in the shift from amnesty to amnesia of the early post-war years in that it often reduced Wiedergutmachung to an economic transaction through which these countries could ‘make amends’ without effecting any deeper political and social defascistization.

THE CATHOLIC CLERGY IN THE NORTH ATLANTIC AREA, 1763-1830: PATTERNS OF DEVIANCY

Abstract: In a very transnational fashion, priestly misbehavior is a constant feature in the primary sources dealing with the United States and British North America, including Québec, between 1763 and 1846. Rather than a catalogue of occurrences, this article briefly surveys the three main elements of such misbehavior, namely, illicit sex, immoderate drinking, and excessive avariciousness. It then suggests an interpretative grid where behavioral norms were interpreted differently whenever they were challenged by local conditions, leading to accusations of misbehavior whether these accusations reflected actual wrongdoings or not. Ethnic rivalries, different institutional traditions, conflicting political choices, and Protestant competition are the most likely candidates to populate such a large framework.

Transcultural body spaces: re-inventing and performing headwrap practice among young Congolese women in London

ABSTRACTThis article examines embodied representation of race, ethnicity, and gender, questioning ideas of cultural appropriation. Using the London-based Congolese transnational fashion brand Kiyana Wraps as a case study, the article addresses how young Congolese designers re-invent their cultural heritage to conceive the label stylisation and construct meanings of Blackness/Africanness. The article also explores the brand’s social spaces, where the headwrap ritual is used by different actors to perform hybrid identities. In addition, wearing the headwrap reveals symbolic metaphors of empowerment, through which intertwined ‘feminist’ and ‘feminine’ identities are evoked. The paper examines how Congolese women are creatively taking inspiration from the environment of London to produce innovative fashion trajectories as lived socio-cultural experiences. It argues how the headwrap ritual signifies an aesthetic and material process through which specific racial and ethnic boundaries are transcended, fabricating transcultural body spaces which encompass individuals with diverse cultural backgrounds.

The role of madoguchi in transnational fashion

Abstract This article uses the Japanese concept of madoguchi, literally ‘window opening’, and applies it in the context of a transnational fashion landscape. Here, a madoguchi acts as an essential go-between person, operating as a mediator between two cultures as well as functioning as a scout, fashion hunter and interpreter. The author’s personal experience as a fashion journalist reporting on notable British creative talent for Hanatsubaki, Shiseido’s Japanese in-house fashion magazine, provides a relational perspective on the role, value and skills of a transcultural madoguchi, as well as consideration of the challenges that arose from this exchange. Reflections on the peculiarities of translation when communicating cultural content to a foreign readership reveal the ‘traffic in things’ involved in global flows and the impact of evolving technology on professional fashion transmission.

Fashion and East Asia: Cultural translations and East Asian perspectives

Abstract

Global Mess and Glamour: Behind the Spectacle of Transnational Fashion

This article examines the dualities of mess and glamour in the display of transnational fashion. Taking up Canada Philippine Fashion Week (2014) as an exemplary cultural site, I explore connections between transnational fashion weeks and celebratory, commercialized forms of multiculturalism. CPFW capitalized on the recent public attention to Asian fashion and attempted to counter the representation of diasporic Filipinos in Toronto. The event instead crafted a plot of multicultural and cosmopolitan success. Despite CPFW’s projection of Filipino fashion as glamorous, the event was also marked by a pattern of disorder in the unplanned, the untidy, and the messy. Threading together work in queer, Asian North American, and global fashion studies, I invert the hierarchy of how we examine contemporary multiculturalism and global capitalism and reread disorder within, constitutive of, and essential to the display and consumption of capital produced by and for the elite. The analysis is based on observations of the fashion shows and backstage preparations, my participation as an audience member, and media and promotional coverage.

The Visual Presentation of Beauty in Transnational Fashion Magazine Advertisements

In the age of globalization, fashion advertising images are increasingly used in multiple cultural arenas. As such, the purpose of the study is to examine how Western media operates in a non-Western context. Specifically, the research aims to investigate how beauty ideals and ethnicity are portrayed in transnational fashion ads. The findings suggest beauty ideals in fashion ads contain similarities and differences across cultural boundaries. In addition, ethnicity of the models plays a crucial role in fashion display. Overall, the research sheds light on cultural theories and promotion strategies in global advertising.

Tailoring Cosmopolitanism in the Italian Nordest

Cosmopolitanism has become a potent means through which the fashion industry captures value in the global economy. Recognizing the selling power of a cosmopolitan imaginary, the provincial clothing firms of North East Italy actively cultivate associations with global cities— drawing from their flow of people, cultures, images, and ideas—to absorb their urban edge and worldly aura. Located in predominantly rural areas far from established fashion centers, these firms symbolically capture the urbs through distribution, communication, and marketing strategies that endorse cities’ mythologies of modernity and excitement. Using stratagems centered around metropolitan cosmopolitanism, firms like Benetton and Diesel—prototypes of the industrial system of the region—skillfully transformed their labels into trendy "cosmobrands" and gained a central place in the topography of transnational fashion networks.

Urbanisms, worlding practices and the theory of planning

This special issue seeks to return the urban to the heart of planning theory. In doing so, it has three objectives. Firstly, it highlights particular urbanisms: how they are produced, lived and negotiated, from New York to Bogota. The articles thus draw attention to the multiplicity of urbanisms that constitute the contemporary world system, thereby disrupting the rather restricted analytics of global cities and world cities. Secondly, the articles pay careful attention to the forms of worlding at work in such urbanisms, demonstrating how the production of the urban takes place in the crucible of modernizing projects of development, regimes of immigration and governance and experiments with neoliberalism and market rule.Thirdly, this special issue seeks to explore the implications of such research and analysis for the field of ideas currently constituted as planning theory. How does the study of urbanisms allow a rigorous understanding of planning as the organization and transformation of space? How can planning theory make sense of seemingly unplanned spaces that lie outside the grid of visible order? In what ways is planning itself a worlding practice, such that models, best practices, expertise and capital circulate in transnational fashion, creating new worlds of planning common sense?

Consuming transnational fashion in London and Mumbai

Drawing on focus group research in London and Mumbai, this paper charts the changing social and cultural contours of transnational fashion consumption. Transnationality is approached as a complex social field, participation in which is not restricted to the members of specific ethnically-defined transnational communities. Following a discussion of the nature of transnational fashion, the paper explores the discursive practices of a wide range of consumers with different degrees of investment in this transnational field encompassing differences of gender and generation, education and occupation. We highlight the existence of multiple forms of modernity (rather than a simple gradient from Western modernity to Eastern tradition), with social and cultural change taking place at an uneven pace and subject to periodic disruption and temporary reversals. In contrast to more linear notions of globalization, defined in terms of the relentless erosion of local difference, our research demonstrates the persistence of locally-specific cultures of consumption in both London and Mumbai. Drawing from Appadurai’s work on the social life of things and Bourdieu’s analysis of the sociology of taste, we attempt to characterise these locally specific consumption cultures. We argue against conventional accounts of ‘authenticity’ as an innate property of particular social groups or particular goods, suggesting that the meaning of goods is defined by their active appropriation in specific contexts of use.