Fashion and Materiality: Cultural Practices in Global Contexts

by Heike Jenss (Editor), Viola Hofmann (Editor)

Fashion is intimately tied to the material world. With a focus on diverse cultural practices, this book offers new insights into the dynamic relationships between fashion, bodies, and material culture. In a series of original case studies, both historical and contemporary, the collection explores how fashion and clothing affect articulations of body and self, experiences of time and place, and the shaping of social and local/global relationships.

With chapters from leading international scholars, Fashion and Materiality takes the reader from the study of clothing and biography, and an early modern “foreign dress” collection, to Chinoiserie clothing in 18th-century Europe and fast fashion production in today's China. The book also examines fashion's role in nation building, and entanglements between fashion and migration across clothing donations for Syrian refugees in Germany and the circulation of “refugee chic” on international fashion runways. Scrutinizing the dense connections between fashion, clothing, materiality, and humanity, the book shows how the material interacts forcefully with the personal and political.

Genres: Fashion

312 pages, Hardcover

Published October 17, 2019

Reviews

[Katrina Sark · Rating 4 out of 5]

Susan B. Kaiser, “Material Subjects: Making Place, Making Time Through Fashion” pp.21-37

p.22 – Time and place differ conceptually, but inextricably merge in everyday experience through the styled-fashioned-dressed body (see Tulloch 2010; Kaiser 2012). And what a complicated body it is: itself intersectional – biologically, socially, culturally and politically constructed through the embodied subject positions of age/generation, class, ethnicity, gender, nationality, “race,” sexuality, and so on.

Gertrud Lehnert and Gabriele Mentges (2013) argue for the need to highlight entanglements across places through time. Specifically, they note that the history if European material culture needs to be rewritten to reflect its entanglement with Eastern / Asian material culture. “Fusion fashion” as a concept recognizes that fashion is not just a Euromodern construct or process.

Euromodern narratives tend to prioritize time over place: the idea that fashion “started” in Europe sometime in the Renaissance or in the early modern period; that there was little or no change in dress elsewhere in the world prior to the European imagination of progress; and that time in general was on an upwardly linear trajectory in Europe but was basically static elsewhere (Riello and McNeil 2010).

Section 3 – Materiality and Embodiment, Introduction, pp.175-180

p.175 – Many fashion theories revolve around the connection between clothing and identity (Davis 1992; Entwistle 2000). They come to the conclusion that clothing and fashion play a constitutive role in the process of identity formation as they act with mental and material-aesthetic force in the identification of human beings according to categories such as gender, class, ethnicity, age, etc. The way humans select, assemble, and wear clothing is part of an embodied process of accumulation, which creates and is equally determined by the cultural situation in or for which people present themselves (Entwistle 2000, Barthes [1967] 1990). That is, the modifications and techniques of the body, made possible by fashion and clothing are highly structured. They are creative, performative acts, through which people construct and experience their being-in-the-world, even if getting dressed in their everyday lives often happens quite habitually and intuitively. We come to know exactly what is appropriate for the job, for leisure, for an evening event, or a job interview. Intangible rules of behavior, which we start to learn at an early age, show us the way through the material-aesthetic possibilities of the world of clothing and fashion.

Section 4 – Material Exchanges: Fashion and Migration, Introduction, pp.233-240

p.234 – The superficial “democratization” associated with consumption and the availability of (fast) fashion evokes equally old and new forms of social stratification. Historically, the expansion of fashion to its current state as a widely accessible low-cost and rapidly disposable commodity, has only been made possible through the ongoing exploitation of human labor at a global scale. In an ongoing race to the bottom, the fashion industry continues to locate and relocate its production sites via subcontractors to places with the lowest cost, from China, to Vietnam, and then to Bangladesh, where the lack safety regulations in 2013 led to the collapse of the Rana Plaza factory building, and the fatal deaths of 1135 garment workers, with an additional 2438 people injured.

p.234 – Europe’s fashion industry has witnessed and been the subject of crucial political upheaval. Since 2015, Europe, a region of relatively high prosperity, has been confronted with a large-scale refugee movement that has posed an unprecedented political and humanistic challenge for countries in the European Union. In one fell swoop, the enthoscapes of European states changed with the incoming, wandering streams of people from African and Middle Eastern countries, with many aiming toward northern Europe as their most hoped-for destination. Old problems and their effects on Europe – including, the legacy of colonialism (especially in France, Belgium, and the UK); the conception of migrants as temporary “guest workers” since the 1950s in Germany; or the migration of people as a result of the Kosovo War – were far from resolved, but rather lay fomenting and unattended beneath the surface until there was a sudden rupture. The most large-scale migration of people from Syria to Europe caused a wave of anxiety, such as the fear of “foreign infiltration,” or Überfremdung, which seemed to be confirmed by the fact that the arrivals looked “different.”

Clothing, as both a materially essential and sociocultural good, played a significant role in the way society, affected local communities, as well as the fashion industry responded to the crisis. Levi Strauss & Co. donated Levi’s and Dockers brand clothing at an estimated value of 800 million euros to a local aid organization in Berlin. And with the mediatization of the refugee crisis, especially in Germany, aid organizations received overwhelming masses of used clothing donations.

p.236 – In her chapter, Andrea Hauser explores the organization of a fashion show in a predominantly migrant neighborhood in the German city of Bremen, arguing that differences in clothing and fashion can be used productively as a source of attention. In an attempt to foster intercultural communication and exchange, and as a way to dismantle cultural prejudices, fashion has been incorporated into a task force that materially merges aesthetics, education, and politics. Hauser describes how clothing is used as a tool in integration policies as the city of Bremen and local NGOs have organized DIY fashion initiatives to counteract growing social pressures occurring through migration. She describes how women from various countries work together in the staging of “international fashion shows,” in which they present their self-made clothing and alterations, drawing inspiration from clothing styles worn in their previous home countries. In this case, the material exchange, through the collective making and presenting of clothing in various local and cultural styles, is intended to promote social and cultural exchange to enhance community-building among the participants.

p.237 – Elke Gaugele, in her chapter, turns to international fashion designers who broached the issue of the refugee crisis by incorporating the theme and look of refugees in their runway shows. Although, in this case, the runway shows were ultimately centered on the promotion of the latest designer collections, they nonetheless drew attention to migration in an aesthetic way. Featuring fashion with multivalent layers of meaning, the 2016 menswear shows highlighted the disturbing ambivalence of a refugee aesthetic that wavered between charismatization and stigmatization. This appropriation of the theme of migration and the fashion designer’s urge to draw attention to the humanistic issue occurred at the same time as many Europe-bound Syrian refugees were being recruited as cheap laborers for the large fashion-producing industry in Turkey. As Gaugele shows in her chapter as well, not only did the fashion industry set out to address the issue of migration with efforts ranging from “aesthetic politics” and “refugee” styling of designer collections to actual donations of clothing, but political and cultural institutions also recognized the potency of fashion in their work as they dealt with diversity and processes of cultural heterogeneity in terms of nation branding.

Andrea Hauser, “International Fashion Shows: Creating Transcultural Relationships Through Clothing” pp.241-259

p.244 – As Susan B. Kaiser puts it, there “is not merely one model for fashion subjectivity. Rather, there are multiple subjectivities, shaped in part by the interplay among diverse positions, for example, nationality, race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality” (Kaiser 2012:28). The human diversity that results from migration movements and cross- or intercultural relationships visibly shapes the cultures of Western countries. In the globalized present, this also leads to new practices in the fashion business. Following Homi K. Bhabha’s concept of hybridization, or in more general terms, the notion of “fusion,” regional and global trends emerge as apparently independent styles (Lehnert 2014: 154). Yet, in the global “transnational outfits” and hybrid fashion styles that manifest themselves in everyday life, social attributions, subject positions, and cultural discourses around nationality, ethnicity, and/or race, still play a dominant role: they are not “outside of the fashion process in terms of cultural representations, appropriations, and hegemonies” (Kaiser 2012:81).

p.245 – Since 2012, the Tenever Internationale Modeschauen have been presented in a variety of public spaces including community and shopping centres. On International Women’s Day in March 2016, the Mütterzentrum Osterholz-Tenever staged its first fashion show in a public transit space, the Bremen train station. As part of the “One Billon Rising” initiative, a global campaign to end violence against women and girls, Bremen central station was declared a “Welcoming Train Station,” an event celebrated on Feb. 4, 2016, with a dance in resistance to gender-based violence. In Germany, the concept of a “culture of welcome” (Willkommenskultur) emerged in 2015, when more than half a million people migrated to the country, receiving a warm welcome from the many German people who went to the train stations to greet the refugees and who volunteered in support work (Otto 2016). As such, the train station became a symbolic site. The fashion show, choreographed by Gabi-Grete Kellerhoff, utilized the prominent staircase in the public entrance area of the station. Accompanied by music, women from seven different countries or region (Ghana, Kosovo, Philippines, Poland, Siberia, Syria, and Russia) emerged, one after the other, from the train station lounge area onto the stair landing and then descended the staircase, each individually presenting her clothes. The moderator, Gabi Kellerhoff, presented the name of each model, her country of origin, and the individual stories of each woman’s arrival in Germany, including their current living conditions and hopes for the future.

p.255 – Due to the close connection between clothing and the body, the textile artifact becomes central to the “cultural and social construction of identity, of social representation and of constructions of subjectivities” (Mentges 2005:22).
The Bremen Modeschauen deviate from the underlying ides of conventional fashion shows, fashion weeks, and fashion contests. They do not present the trendiest new collections or designer lines, not is the clothing presented by professional models with ideal measurements, not is their primary goal to market or sell any of the showcased clothing. Rather, the shows aim to facilitate communication, public performance, and visibility for women who have to engage with the complex negotiations of identity within and across cultures. In this way, the Bremen Modeschauen are primarily understood as a community-building educational venture. The function of clothing, as a central part of material culture, is not only pragmatic but it also serves as a significant basis for negotiation of the creation and shaping of social relationships (Mentges 2005:14).

p.256 – The images presented or embodied by the Modeschauen can be interpreted with a nod to Judith Butler (1991) as “fashion trouble,” an evocation of transculturality. They present diversity as semiotic wealth and potentially support openness towards the “Other.” By mixing and overlaying cultural stereotypes – in this case, traditional or regional styles or ethnic dress – open and contradictory affinities and identities come to emerge.
The women in Tenever demonstrate in this sense, at a small-scale, local level, what it can look like to wear “globalization on our bodies” (Kaiser 2012:33).
In this rendering of globalization, the historically marginalized populations – that is, women and migrants – have found a way to formulate their agency, in the “in-between-space” (Kaiser 2012:37). These women articulate and represent the intersectionalities of their identities through the imitated and hybridized fashions of their culture of origin and Western modern fashion. In this way, they can open up a creative space beyond the binary way of thinking between the “Self” and the “Other.”