Agnès Rocamora - Thinking Through Fashion: A Guide to Key Theorists

Agns Rocamora is Reader in Social and Cultural Studies at the London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London. She is the author of Fashioning the City: Paris, Fashion and the Media (I.B.Tauris 2009) and a co-editor of The Handbook of Fashion Studies (2013) and of Fashion Media: Past and Present (2013). She also co-edits the International Journal of Fashion Studies.

Anneke Smelik is Professor of Visual Culture on the Katrien van Munster chair at the Radboud University Nijmegen, Netherlands. Her books include Delft Blue to Denim Blue: Dutch Fashion (I.B.Tauris, 2016) and Performing Memory in Art and Popular Culture (2013). She is project leader of the research programme Crafting Wearables: Fashionable Technology.

Series Editors: Reina Lewis & Elizabeth Wilson

Advisory Board: Christopher Breward, Hazel Clark, Joanne Entwistle, Caroline Evans, Susan Kaiser, Angela McRobbie, Hiroshi Narumi, Peter McNeil, zlem Sandk, Simona Segre Reinach

Across a digital world in which the same T-shirt can be designed in New York, manufactured in Hong Kong, boycotted in London and consumed by a global network of wearers, how do we locate individuality and cultural distinctiveness among the capitalist interplay of logo and subculture? As consumer citizens in a retail society, how does what we buy correlate with our age, gender, ethnicity and class, and how is uniqueness expressed among the proliferation of seemingly infinite choice?

Dress Cultures aims to foster innovative theoretical and methodological frame- works to understand how and why we dress, exploring the connections between clothing, commerce and creativity in global contexts.

Published and forthcoming in the Dress Culture series:

Dressing for Austerity: Aspiration, Leisure and Fashion in Post-War Britain

Geraldine Biddle-Perry

Experimental Fashion: Performance Art, Carnival and the Grotesque Body

Francesca Granata

Fashion & Popular Print in Early Modern England: Depicting Dress in Black-Letter Ballads

Clare Backhouse

Fashion in European Art: Dress and Identity, Politics and the Body, 17751925

Justine de Young (Ed)

Fashioning Indie: Popular Fashion, Music and Gender

Rachel Lifter

Making Fashion in Multiple Chinas: Chinese Styles in the Transglobal Landscape

Wessie Ling and Simone Segre-Reinach (Eds)

Modest Fashion: Styling Bodies, Mediating Faith

Reina Lewis (Ed)

Niche Fashion Magazines: Changing the Shape of Fashion

Ane Lynge-Jorln

Sinophilia: Fashion, Western Modernity and Things Chinese after 1900

Sarah Cheang

Slow Fashions: Making Sense of Sustainable Fashion

Anna Konig

Thinking through Fashion: A Guide to Key Theorists

Agns Rocamora and Anneke Smelik (Eds)

Wearing the Niqab: Fashioning Identities among Muslim Women in the UK

Anna Piela

Queries, ideas and submissions to:

Reina Lewis: reina.lewis@fashion.arts.ac.uk

Elizabeth Wilson: mail@elizabethwilson.net

At the publisher, Philippa Brewster: philippabrewster@gmail.com

Thinking thr o ugh Fashi o n

A Guide to Key Theorists

Agns Rocamora and Anneke Smelik (editors)

Published in 2016 by

I.B.Tauris & Co. Ltd

London New York

www.ibtauris.com

The right of Agns Rocamora and Anneke Smelik to be identified as the editors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Copyright Editorial Selection 2016 Agns Rocamora and Anneke Smelik

Copyright Individual Chapters 2016 Joanne Entwistle, Adam Geczy, Alison Gill, Francesca Granata, Paul Jobling, Vicki Karaminas, Peter McNeil, Janice Miller, Llewellyn Negrin, Aurlie Van de Peer, Agns Rocamora, Anneke Smelik, Anthony Sullivan, Efrat Tselon, Jane Tynan and Elizabeth Wissinger

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Every attempt has been made to gain permission for the use of the images in this book. Any omissions will be rectified in future editions.

References to websites were correct at the time of writing.

Dress Cultures

ISBN: 978 1 78076 733 8 HB

978 1 78076 734 5 PB

eISBN:978 0 85773 986 5

A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

A full CIP record is available from the Library of Congress

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: available

Typeset by Out of House

C o ntents

Agns Rocamora and Anneke Smelik

Anthony Sullivan

Janice Miller

Peter McNeil

Adam Geczy and Vicki Karaminas

Francesca Granata

Llewellyn Negrin

Paul Jobling

Efrat Tselon

Anneke Smelik

Jane Tynan

Aurlie Van de Peer

Efrat Tselon

Agns Rocamora

Alison Gill

Joanne Entwistle

Elizabeth Wissinger

Figures

Photograph of the aftermath of the Rana Plaza garment factory collapse in April 2013, Ismail Ferdous courtesy of Ismail Ferdous.

Roses: A Social Hypothesis, published in Jugend, no. 24, 1897, courtesy of Universittsbibliothek Heidelberg.

Martin Margiela, Enlarged Collection, Autumn/Winter 20002001, Courtesy of the Maison Martin Margiela.

Martin Margiela, Magnified, Doll Clothes Collection, Spring/Summer 1999, Courtesy of the Maison Martin Margiela.

Rei Kawakubo, outfit from the Body Meets DressDress Meets Body collection, 1997, COMME des GARONS.

Naomi Filmer, Orchid Neck Piece, 2008 for Anne Valerie Hash, courtesy of Naomi Filmer.

Mrs Thatcher greets Katherine Hamnett, wearing a T-shirt with an anti-nuclear message, at a reception for British Fashion Week, Downing Street, March 1984, courtesy of the Press Association.

Capriole, F/W 2011, by Iris van Herpen, photograph by Peter Stigter, courtesy of Peter Stigter.

LucyandBart, Germination Day One, 2008, courtesy of Bart Hess.

LucyandBart, Germination Day Eight, 2008, courtesy of Bart Hess.

Flowerbomb, S/S 2005, by Viktor & Rolf, photograph by Peter Stigter, courtesy of Peter Stigter.

A model walks the runway at the Jean Paul Gaultier fashion show during Paris Fashion Week on 5 March 2011 in Paris, France, Anton Oparin courtesy of Shutterstock.

Male body-builders or wrestlers of the Physical Culture Society of Montreal, Canada, posing with their trainer in a photographic studio, Gordon 1905, courtesy of Wellcome Library, London.

Conventional toilet signs. The female figure is often positioned on a narrower base, sometimes balancing on a point. Photographs courtesy of the author.

From Insalaam, Inshalom. By threeASFOUR, a New York based fashion and art collective, from their exhibition at Beit Hair Center for Urban Culture, Tel Aviv, 20112012. Photographs courtesy of the author.

A British national flag is reduced to its ornamental features, to decorate functional domestic objects like pillow cases, or towels. Photographs courtesy of the author.

Lining Dress or Dress as (photographed) lining, S/S 1996, Maison Martin Margiela, photographer Guy Voet, courtesy of the Maison and ModeMuseum Antwerp.

Dummy waistcoat, S/S 1997, Maison Martin Margiela, photographer Ronald Stoops, courtesy of the Maison, ModeMuseum Antwerp and Ronald Stoops.