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The papers assembled in this forum examine the Geographies of Fashion and Style through texts, visual images, material objects and processes of growing and making, as lived experiences and performative practices and, crucially, as concepts and practices that travel and mutate over time and place. In this introduction, we chart the Eurocentric cultural episteme of the fashion industry and fashion studies and dismantle it by drawing on, and out, globally-orientated and decentered approaches to the study of fashion and style. Our contribution to debates on fashion and style is to draw out five impulses arising at the intersections of geography and fashion studies and which our collection of papers brings to the fore: Theorizing, Queering, Decolonizing, Ecologizing, and Curating. In doing so, our introduction foregrounds the significance of fashion and style as sites of (micro) political problems and potentials, and is a call and a framework through which to extend and take seriously the diverse processes of fashion and style as sentient to the broader themes and scholarship of concern in the geohumanities.

This paper uses a fashioned ostrich plume to conceptualize and re-present ostrich “feather-work” as being co-constituted by human and non-human labor. The plume archives not only the human hands that fashioned it but also the bird-body that grew the feathers, insisting it be conceptualized and researched as a grown-made commodity. From this starting point, I reconstruct its journey along the “feather-road”: from reared and plucked ostrich on a South African ostrich farm to willowed plume in Euro-American sweatshops. By fleshing-out the “hybrid labor” involved in the plume’s growing and making, I demonstrate that feather-work not only exploited indigenous African, indentured migrant, and sweated immigrant human laborers, but how it yoked the reproductive and metabolic labor of ostriches. By doing so the paper illustrates how this luxury feather-fashion accessory is historically implicated in colonial, economic, and ecological violence, locating the troubling journeys of fashion’s “bio-commodities” further back in time.