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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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article takes as its starting point an encounter with a preserved blue bird-of-paradise skin. Though rare, the bird became wildly famous after it perched atop the head of Carrie Bradshaw during Sex and the City: The Movie. However, where in the movie the bird-skin acted as Carrie's something blue, I mobilize it in this article as a "telling example" of near-extinction. This is because the blue bird-of-paradise is but one of the millions of Paradisaea that were hunted, traded, shipped, and lusted after since their earliest forms of commodification. And as the theory of sexual selection confirms, biographical entitlement cannot be assigned to a singular agent in the blue bird-of-paradise's story, which is why this article will chart its biogeographies: from New Guinea rainforests to New York streets. Here, instead of tracing the blue bird-of-paradise's individual commodity biography, it becomes an act of tracing and placing the bird-skin within the life and death worlds of human-animal relations that produced, mobilized, and maintain(ed) it as a commodity over time and space. In doing so, the article makes two important contributions to the field of social history. First, by conceptually focusing on the relations that produce lives, things, and worlds, it challenges the certainty that anchors the narration of biographies to the singular and anthropocentric embodiment of "a life." Second, mapping the biogeographies of a "lively" commodity, such as a preserved bird-of-paradise, offers the opportunity of highlighting the significant role so-called natural species and histories can play in shaping human histories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Perdita Phillips is a Western Australian artist working across the media of walking, sound, installation, photography and digital media. Through her multi-disciplinary multi-media art practice she explores the mutual relationships between people and the nonhuman world. Over the past ten years she has worked on art projects drawn from, and co-produced with, termites, minerals, bowerbirds, rabbits, cane toads, salmon gum trees and thrombolites, amongst others. With a background in environmental science Phillips' work is often complementary to, though not constrained by, scientific understanding. Indeed her work often focuses on matter(s) that exceed scientific understanding or which might not be considered logically sensible in order to recover a sense of astonishment or wonder often stripped from scientific interpretation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An essay is presented on a set of photographs of the oil sands production sites in Canada by photographer Andriko Lozowy. The author presents a comparison to Edward Burtynsky's aerial perspectives on the oil sands industry. Lozowy's images are said to present a point of view in the oil sands. According to the author, Lozowy's "Where is Fort McMurray?" also creates a more significant photographic experience with this oil project.

An artist and a geographer asked the same question: what is a zoological specimen and how can it be used? Considerable attention has been paid to the 'finished' form and display of taxidermy specimens inside cabinets, behind glass -- in other words to their representation. We challenge the priority given to representation by getting under the skin and behind-the-scenes to show how specimens have been entangled 'in life' as well as how we have creatively taken part in their 'afterlives'. These efforts are aligned with work in cultural geography seeking to counteract 'deadening effects' in an active world (Thrift and Dewsbury 2000), and stay alive to the 'more-than-representational' aspects of life (Lorimer 2005). The paper documents two of our experimental attempts to revive and repair zoological specimens and collections, work which was underlain by observations of taxidermy practice. First we show how the creation of a 'webarchive' offered an expanded repertoire of interpretation and engagement for an extremely rare zoological specimen. Secondly, we show how a temporary exhibition in a zoology museum highlighted the transformative potential of crossdisciplinary efforts to re-present zoological material. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]