Through five cases from high-end fashion brands, this article explores the use of models in contemporary fashion marketing. The models represent subversive beauty ideals, and the aim of the analysis is to determine whether these ‘faces’ are intended to challenge stereotypes concerning age, gender, body and sexuality or whether they are examples of marketing absorbing consumer behaviour to appeal to contemporary consumers. The research is based on fashion campaigns and runway shows in mainly luxury fashion brands in the Euro-American market in the period 2009–2012. The article concludes that while greater diversity may be a positive side effect of the use of subversive beauty ideals the stereotypes are also the prerequisite for the social strategy at play. This strategy deals with the Logic of Wrong where social distinction is created through literally doing something that is considered socially or culturally wrong.
This article offers an analytical perspective on the implications of recent media evolutions for the conventional roles of the designer, with a particular emphasis on the changing relation between amateur and professional design in fashion culture. The article builds on the recent media studies literature on the intensification of media communications and the deeper transformations-mediatizationsof many areas in business and society. There is already extensive literature on the mediatization of finance, politics, food, and religion, for instance, but how is the process playing out in fashion? And what are the implications of this process for designers and design education? The article argues that media have become a key context for understanding the changing dynamics between professionals and amateurs and the evolution of more distributed forms of design creativity. The article is a conceptual paper that begins by situating the evolution of amateur design in theories of media and modernity to offer a theorization of amateur design and to establish an analytical perspective from which core aspects of the changing amateur/ industry divide are illustrated in analytical sections. Among the examples are the online platform Etsy and the T-shirt company Threadless. The conclusion puts the findings of the case studies into perspective and points to a future where new generations of designers and design educators approach and strategically manage these new relationships and distributed forms of creativity.
The major part of this issue of Fashion Practice derives from a selection of the papers presented at the conference on the emerging topic of "fashion thinking" that took place at the University of Southern Denmark in 2014. These papers were selected following a call for papers and double blind peer review process. The editorial summary by the conference organisers, and guest editors of this special themed issue, provides the full context for this publication. We would like to thank Trine Brun Petersen, Maria Mackinney-Valentin and Marie Riegels Melchior for their work in preparing this edition of Fashion Practice. In addition, as general editors we have included two further Editorial 2 manuscripts that relate directly to the themes and topics emerging from the Fashion Thinking conference: a paper by Yinqing Zhang and Oskar Jhulin looking at fashion thinking in relation to mobile phone design, and a commentary by Kevin Almond on the role and status of pattern cutting practices within fashion research, complementing his coauthored paper from the conference (with Steve Swindells) "Sculptural Thinking in Fashion". We believe the articles in this issue contribute to some creative rethinking about fashion.
We dress to communicate who we are, or who we would like others to think we are, telling seductive fashion narratives through our adornment. Yet, today, fashion has been democratized through high-low collaborations, social media, and real-time fashion mediation, complicating the basic dynamic of identity displays, and creating tension between personal statements and social performances. Fashioning Identity explores how this tension is performed through fashion production and consumption, by examining a diverse series of case studies - from ninety-year old fashion icons to the paradoxical rebellion in “normcore”, and from soccer jerseys in Kenya to heavy metal band T-shirts in Europe. Through these cases, the role of time, gender, age memory, novelty, copying, the body, and resistance are considered within the context of the contemporary fashion scene. Offering a fresh approach to the subject by readdressing Fred Davis’ seminal concept of “identity ambivalence” in Fashion, Culture, and Identity (1992), Mackinney-Valentin argues that we are in an epoch of “status ambivalence”, in which fashioning one’s own identity has become increasingly complicated.
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