The ongoing growth of clothing, footwear, and accessories marketed as vegan requires the development of a usable definition for the segment, as well as a review of the classification system which has permeated the use of materials of animal origin within fashion. Guided by literature on fashion, veganism, and animal agriculture, this conceptual article discusses the tangible enactment of ideological values when applied in the context of fashion products and materials. Established within this article is that a vegan fashion or textile product be defined as one that ensures, throughout the supply chain, and in the fibers, materials and chemicals that were used to manufacture the end-product, to be devoid of any forms of animal involvement, namely through the avoidance of animal products, co-products, and by-products. Also suggested is that definitions of materials of animal origin should be reframed to acknowledge the level of involvement required from animals and insects in obtaining materials, namely their death, labor, or secretions. While traditional relationships between humans and animals are rarely questioned, this article, by recentring the animals as unwilling participants in the commercialization of their bodies, offers new ways to reflect upon the fashion industry’s use of animals as resources.

To tackle the high rates of textile waste in the fashion industry through design, it is imperative to understand what makes people keep and wear their clothes for longer. In this paper, we present an analysis of a survey which prompted female participants to write about one of their oldest garments still in use. Following Chapman’s notion that waste is symptomatic of failed relationships, we looked into theory on interpersonal love relationships—in particular, Gottman and Gottman’s Sound Relationship House Theory—to explore if interpersonal relationship traits can be identified in satisfactory long wearer-clothing relationships. Our study shows that principles of happy, lasting interpersonal relationships can be found in wearer-clothing relationships. Moreover, the study shows how friendship principles contribute to wearers’ willingness to overcome conflict in their relationship with clothes, as well as to the creation of meaning. Our findings suggest that designing for emotional attachment should focus on supporting the friendship system, which is foundational for emotional attachment to develop. We illustrate our findings with empirical data and discuss them with relevant literature, while also providing examples on how design can contribute to strengthening the friendship system of wearer-clothing relationships, beyond designed attributes in clothes.

This article analyzes the methods employed to ensure the conservation of the value of goods sold on The RealReal online marketplace, a new-generation secondhand fashion reseller associated with the “circular economy.” First, we map challenges that The RealReal needs to overcome in order to enable fashion objects to come back onto the market. Next, based on a mixed methodology research, we detail the methods being used by the reseller to address these issues and analyze their effect. We argue that these methods interfere with the cultural biography of the objects being sold and present The RealReal as an authority in certifying the authenticity of a fashion object, although it has no official or practical ability to do so. By achieving this position, The RealReal forms a connection between the original brand and The RealReal’s own end customer. This connection is used to highlight the branded value of the objects, and at the same time to obscure the traces of previous ownership, to deflect attention from the fact that the inventory is mostly secondhand. We conclude that by doing so, the reseller has come up with a formula that enables fashion objects to take part in the circular economy.

This article explores how UK women encounter religious dress and behavior codes in religious work contexts. It compares two very different case studies: women working at faith-based organizations in the UK and women working for secular organizations who travel for work to Saudi Arabia. Using 65 semi-structured interviews, participant wardrobe photographs, and observation in regional modest fashion retail, the article analyzes women workers’ experience in religious contexts as a form of aesthetic labor. It investigates the gendered and religious components which structure women’s different responses to workplace modesty codes. Detailing the additional aesthetic and emotional labor demanded of women in crafting modest professional appearances in religious contexts, the research reveals continuities in how workplace modesty requirements impact on women’s occupational performance and sense of self. The conclusion argues that religion-related workplace modesty codes constitute a religiously-inflected form of organizational aesthetics that may operate simultaneously with, but be experienced differently from, secular-driven organizational aesthetics. We find that religious dress codes are arbitrated by the avoidance of shame, an affect accompanying the government of modesty for all involved. We find that organizations benefit from, but do not recognize or recompense, the additional aesthetic labor that modesty demands of women.

In the past decade, Edgar Degas’s milliner series (1876–1910) received new attention thanks to a youtube video by the Art Institute of Chicago and a joint exhibition in Saint Louis and San Francisco. A consensus has formed to interpret the works, which show milliners and customers contemplating hats, as artistic self-reflection, with the milliners standing for artists and the hats for artworks. This article picks up where the research left off, adding to the interpretation of the works as artistic self-reflection insights on the history of palette pedagogy and literary sources so far not connected to Degas. It also adds a “why,” locating the analogy of hats and art in Degas’s oeuvre, comparing it to that of his contemporaries, and contributing a pragmatic answer to the 19th century discussion: “What is art for?”

Fashion education is caught in a moment of intense transformation. While the fashion industry continues along a reckless path of social and environmental destruction, a new generation of students are activating our educational institutions, demanding real and radical change. Meanwhile, the theoretical field of Fashion Studies has rapidly taken a central position in imagining a new vision of fashion in a global context, re-writing problematic histories, challenging Eurocentric dominance and dismantling prevailing ideologies. This article, in the form of a manifesto for educators, calls for a return to the origins of fashion scholarship within the discipline of British Cultural Studies. It asks what we might learn from Cultural Studies’ intersection with Critical Pedagogy as a way to “do” fashion politics within our classrooms. By drawing on initiatives pioneered by the Cultural and Historical Studies Department at London College of Fashion, this manifesto explores how British Cultural Studies can be re-articulated for our current times, in order to forge new alliances between theory and practice, and enact radical action beyond the walls of our academic institutions.

This article is an analysis of critical fashion practices in Israel/Palestine based on interviews conducted with two design teams: Israeli-Palestinian brand ADISH and Palestinian brand tRASHY. These two brands share a commitment to fashion design and fashion image-making as tools of community building: a project that goes hand in hand with a rethinking of systems of production and labor. The aesthetic and political dimension of their practices, however, are inevitably marked by the different experiences and positionalities (as Israelis or Palestinians) of their respective founders. I situate their creative practices in the wake of the post-Oslo Accords and suggest that such practices should be understood as part of a broader creative solidarity movement that contests nationalism, oppression, and separation. The affective labor involved in the development of community-building design projects, the cooperative creative process, and the generation of capital used to support local female workers as well as refugee and/or LGBTQ populations in Palestine are the constituents of a larger grassroots mobilization aimed at fostering change. This article contributes to ongoing scholarly work on art practices of world-making and explores how fashion could provide a stage for rethinking both the aesthetic and the political in a contested sociopolitical landscape.

The Marchesa Luisa Casati has become a perennial muse of fashion designers in recent decades, from haute couture to High Street brands. Collections inspired by the Marchesa link to her background and the history of the spaces that she inhabited. Casati was born in Italy but lived and traveled between France, Italy and Britain, among other countries, where the cachet of her name has been combined with that of the fashion houses citing her as an inspiration. Despite her enduring reputation as an avant-garde style icon and a singular dresser who was just as likely to wear elaborate costumes as nothing at all, her engagement with fashion was not always as visibly eccentric as her posthumous impact suggests. Nor was it strictly within the binary of fashion and “anti-fashion”. Casati was at once a “disruptive” body and a conventionally stylish one. Popular memory has focused on the more “spectacular” and stylized elements of her esthetic. Archival evidence and artistic representation demonstrate how Casati constructed a wardrobe that melded the conventional and shocking, and how fashion played a role in the emergence of her chimerical public persona.