Critical Studies in Fashion and Beauty brings together articles from the first volume of this cutting-edge journal—which is also the first of its kind in the field. Taken together, the pieces collected here offer a snapshot of critical debate in fashion, a growing area of scholarly interest.
The volume’s contributors, who come from disciplines across the humanities and social sciences, explore such topics as fashion trends in a global context, including contemporary Italian fashion identity, the kimono’s metamorphoses, the dynamics of luxury and basic fashion after the recent economic crisis, and the negotiation through fashion of social class and feminine identity. Their collective efforts contribute to the journal’s mission: the examination of fashion and beauty systems as symbolic spaces of production, reproduction, representation, and communication of artifacts; meanings; social practices; and renditions of cloth, clothing, and appearance. Critical Studies in Fashion and Beauty will therefore interest scholars of fashion and anyone looking for an introduction to this dynamic area of inquiry.
Table of Contents
Outlining a fashion studies project
Efrat Tseëlon
Articles
Perpetuum mobile
Zygmunt Bauman
On fashion and fashion discourses
Ana Marta González
The dynamics of luxury and basic-ness in post-crisis fashion
Francesco Morace
The real fashion trends in a global context
Future Concept Lab
From the Noticeboard
100,000 Years of Beauty, Elizabeth Azoulay (ed.) (2009)
Charlotte Waite’s Fairy Project: Rethinking the fashion show
Editorial
Auction prices of fashion collectibles: What do they mean?
Diana Crane
Part 2: Editorial
Is identity a useful critical tool?
Efrat Tseëlon
Articles
Fashioned identity and the unreliable image
Joanne Finkelstein
Digital identity management: Old wine in new bottles?
Michael R. Solomon
Russian immigrant women and the negotiation of social class and feminine identity through fashion
Alexandra Korotchenko and Laura Hurd Clarke
If you speak fashion you speak Italian: Notes on present day Italian fashion identity
Simona Segre Reinach
Revisioning the kimono
Sheila Cliffe
Coming out of the cabinet: fashioning the closet with Sweden’s most famous diplomat
Dirk Gindt
Exhibition Review
The return of the absent body in the fashion museum: ‘Dressing the body’ exhibition
Index