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This article argues for an updated theoretical framework in fashion studies. It proposes that perspectives emphasizing the social role and the technological nature of dress should be considered complementary, and that their joint application can contribute to new understandings of fashion history. Employing ethnographic methods, this stance is explored through a comparative analysis of the sartorial practices of two groups of women living or working in Amsterdam during the 1950s and the 2010s. A theoretical framework integrating theories of identity (mainly based on the writings of Georg Simmel and Gabriel Tarde) and the philosophy of technology (in this case the device paradigm of Albert Borgmann) allows us to uncover a paradoxical history of fashion in which clothing shifts roles, transforming from “things of imitation” into “devices of differentiation.” [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Louis XIV used his body as a political territory to strengthen the power of the State. On the contrary, Marie Antoinette used her body as a subjective territory to recuperate her autonomy. Through fashion, Marie Antoinette created a narrative program that expressed both her wish for recognition and her need for independence. This article reconstructs, from the perspective of the Semiotics of passion, Marie Antoinette's passionate journey as it is narrated by Sofia Coppola, showing how fashion allowed her to challenge the French court and expressed her subjectivity. By using the fashion system as a defensive strategy of legitimization, Marie Antoinette contributed to undermine the political structures that supported the aristocratic order. Simultaneously, she strengthened her individuality and confronted those who denied her recognition. From this perspective, Marie Antoinette appears as a contemporary character, as a subject other, a teenager, a foreigner, a woman who, in an inhospitable space, seeks beauty to construct a public image that expresses her identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article investigates French women's dress during the reign of King Louis XVI of France, particularly focusing on changing fashion trends in the 1770s due to an increasing English influence on fashion. It addresses the popularization of simple garments intended to be more comfortable for the wearer in informal settings, as well as notes the presence of garments from this time period in dress collections. Other topics explored include the reduction in hoop petticoat size, the "Robe à la Polonaise," by Claude-Louis Desrais, and the enhancement of a slender waist.

Piña cloth signaled the epitome of luxury, refinement, and wealth in nineteenth-century Philippines. Woven from the delicate threads of the fiber of the pineapple plant in a labor-intensive process that produced only half an inch a day in the nineteenth century to a meter a day today, it was a textile unique to the Philippines. This article analyzes the connections between cloth, dress, status, class, and national identity from the nineteenth-century Spanish colonial era to the present. It argues that piña was connected to the identity of the ilustrado class and links the decline of piña as "high fashion" with the rise of new elites with new dress and consumption practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article maps the looks and lifestyle choices of small groups of young, like-minded people who emerged in the postwar Soviet Union and East Europe in the background of huge political, social, and cultural changes. With their androgynous bodies wrapped in drape jackets and narrow trousers, and their love of jazz and swing, these young men stood in a sharp contrast to the official ideology that promoted socialism as a new, pure, and highly rationalized project, its ideal robust and strong man, and its mass culture that insisted on educational and restrained forms of entertainment. Through the categories of dress, body, and big city, the article investigates the clashes, and the eventual truce, between the socialist streamlined and rationalized master narrative and the young dandies' fragmented and disordered narrative. The article argues that the socialist dandies were not politically minded, and that their challenge to the officially proclaimed values was informed by their adolescent recklessness and a general postwar desolation. They were declared state enemies because the socialist regimes did not allow for alternative types of modernity. Consequently, the authorities condemned the young dandies' looks and interests as cosmopolitan, because they originated in the West, and as artificial, since they belonged to the culture that had preceded a new socialist world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Nigeria, what is known as aso ebi has become one of the most powerful elements for understanding the city's sartorial practices and visual economy. Aso ebi is a common Yoruba phrase meaning, "uniformed solidarity dressing." In this article, I argue that, while aso ebi is a consequence of what I call Lagos cosmopolitanism, its fashioning is largely tied to a dialogue between photographers, fashion magazines, vendors, and tailors in urban Lagos. I demonstrate how the central facilitator of this mutuality resides in the fashion magazines. The article shows that while the language of aso ebi, both in its socializing message and dress codes, frames the notions of uniformity, the practice of copying enables the individuals to transcend the burdens imposed by aso ebi uniformity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently fashion exhibitions have been blossoming in Dutch museums to the extent that they verged on becoming a trendy phenomenon. Because of this upsurge in popularity we, as academic scholars, decided to devote a seminar to this subject in the context of the Master Museum Studies at the University of Amsterdam. The purpose of the seminar was to find out whether the popularity of museum fashion exhibitions had influenced the fashion collecting and presentation policies of the museums in recent years. The museums we studied staged a whole gamut of fashion exhibitions ranging from visual spectacles to community outreach projects. Although, these various fashion exhibitions cater to an increasingly diversified audience, they all have become attuned to the overall cultural environment audiences are living in, which is predominantly a visual culture of which the spectacular, the sensorial, and the participatory are key constituents. Dutch museums are very much in line with, even at the forefront of, museological movements that try to meet the challenges of the future. This is mainly due to the ever-growing influence of the neoliberal cultural policy on the one hand, to the open and experimental climate that has been pervading the Dutch museum world since the 1950s onwards on the other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the nineteenth century, in France, the UK, and the USA, there was a rapid development of ready-to-wear clothing and of its consumption. In this context, one phenomenon allows us to understand more fully the overall changes in attitudes toward fashion, clothing, and the body: the craze for rubber clothing from the beginning of the 1840s. This material appeared to be miraculous, and proved to be equally useful in underwear and in rainwear. Manufacturers dreamt about seamless garments and about totally adjustable pieces of clothing. Moreover, rubber clothing was thought of as hygienic, as it could be easily cleaned. From the 1850s to the late 1870s, rubber cloth conquered both public streets and intimate private life. But rubber was not only used in clothing. From the beginning, rubber was a material not only for outdoor clothes but also for orthopedics and for the enhancement of comfort. Mackintosh (UK), Goodyear and Roxbury India Rubber (USA), and Hutchinson and Rattier & Guibal (France) were the major manufacturers that produced rubber shoes, raincoats, collars, and cuffs, while orthopedists made corsets in order to straighten bodies, as well as hernial bandages, pessaries, belts against onanism, and other medical appliances. Rubber cloth hugged the intimate bourgeois body: corsets, garters, socks, and braces initially, and in the early 1880s, rubber condoms. In this way, rubber became the material of unproductive sexual pleasure. Over time, rubber clothing came to be regarded as shameful and disturbing. Around 1890, after the unprecedented craze for rubber, the bourgeoisie gave up their rubber clothes in public life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The profession of fashion designer varies among the main fashion cities, and therefore has an eminently geographical rationale. Different conceptions of vestimentary creativity are usually tied to the affiliation of the creator with one of the fashion capitals. In this article, the main variables determining the specific features of how the profession is exercised in one city or another are illustrated. The case of Milan is then considered, in order to describe distinctive aspects of the profession of local fashion designers. The discussion is not based on information pertaining to the most successful designers, since it is not the most famous cases that furnish reliable information on the profession. Rather, it draws on twenty-one in-depth interviews with "ordinary" fashion designers conducted as part of an empirical research project carried out over recent years. It concludes that Milanese designers cultivate a "culture of wearability" based on an array of values including respect for the body, creative prudence, attention to the consumer's needs, conservatism, and business profit. In such a culture priority is given, not so much to radical innovation and visual aesthetic quality, as to incremental innovation and functionality with respect to the use made of garments in everyday life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article looks at advice on how to dress the body in order to achieve a slim figure from around 1960 and after 2000. How should clothes consumers materialize the ideals verbalized and visualized? How are big consumers portrayed, and what can contribute to making their bodies socially accepted, or preferably beautiful? The material shows how the communication of the ideal is maintained despite the change in communication form. Around 1960 the books were clear in their communication of the norms. In today's literature norms are no longer presented as norms, but are referred to as personal choices and a matter of well-being. In this way the strict ideal of similarity can be sustained under the guise of individuality. The article can therefore contribute to an understanding of why so much apparent freedom results in so little variation in the ways in which people actually dress. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Women's Aesthetic dress, as depicted in satires, is often an external symptom of transgressive ideas or behavior: the independent young woman, the disobedient wife, or the inattentive mother becomes less threatening when safely contained on the stage or in the cartoon. While the distillation of Aesthetic trappings that occurs in satires may not accurately represent the subtle ideological and philosophical underpinnings of Aestheticism, it does make clear the fundamental shift in aesthetics that was representative of greater social shifts. The satires represent ruptures in the Victorian social order, signaling the nascent modern or proto-feminist sensibility truly at work in the female Aesthete. When women take up the mantle of Aesthetic dress, the ramifications extend beyond their own femininity or sexuality to their partners, their children, and society itself. The cartoons and plays discussed in this article pathologize the woman in Aesthetic dress, linking her clothing to physical or mental illness or deviance from her husband. But the satires also consistently offer hope for stasis: return the Victorian woman to Victorian dress, and the restoration of the home and marriage naturally follows. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including fashionable clothes, fashion photography and history of clothing.

During the nineteenth century, dress constituted one of the main and most visible fields of modernization in Greece. "Frankish" clothes became gradually widespread and symbolized the participation in urban modernity and the rejection of a traditional, rural past. Exaggerations in dressing habits, as well as in other manifestations of imitating the "West," were often a source of derision. This critical attitude is exemplified by the novel The Ape Xouth of 1848, its main character being a man turned ape who acts as a relentless satirist of Athenian reality. The novel's plot, connecting the human species with other members of the animal kingdom, echoes evolutionary (Lamarckian) theories to which the educated Greek public had already been introduced through a number of publications. The interest in evolutionary theories further increased after the publication of articles related to Darwinian evolution. Evolutionary theories provided a background against which social phenomena, including fashion, were discussed and analyzed. The Greek word for aping was used extensively to describe a state of blind imitation, as opposed to innovation or creative transformation of foreign influences. The interaction between fashion and evolutionary theories in nineteenth-century Greece reflected shifting ideas about the biological other or cultural outsider. Emerging evolutionary theories deeply affected the meaning of authenticity, of the "true self," and touched on the issue of cultural identity, which was already problematic and highly contested in the young Greek state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines relationships between the museum fashion exhibit, viewing publics, and historians. It takes as a case study AngloMania: Tradition and Transgression in British Fashion, held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, May 3-September 4 2006, as an example of a possibly new type of exhibition merging art-historical research with contemporary styling and viewing practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including an exhibition on the work of the fashion designer Alexander McQueen, the clothing trends of Eastern Europe during the 1950s and an exploration of attire worn by women at Vassar College in the 1950s.

The article discusses various reports published within the issue including one by Tara Zanardi concerning the costuming of the Duchess of Alba, one by Rebecca N. Mitchell about Aesthetic dress and one by Mary Lou O'Neil about the politicization of clothing in Turkey.