Description
Book SynopsisFashion and Feeling: The Affective Politics of Dress explores the complex nexus of fashion and the feeling body from a variety of critical perspectives across fashion studies, anthropology, sociology, design practice, and media studies. It asks such questions as: What does fashion look and feel like in an age dominated by amplified anxiety, isolation, depression, and precariousness? How are feelings woven into clothing and mobilized through fashion practices in ways that might sustain living with a sense of ongoing crisis? Does fashion
have the potential to help us reimagine new lifeworlds which might be reinvigorating? In other words, how is fashion engaging with the “bad,” the “good,” and the ambivalent feelings associated with our personal and collective histories, with our troubled political present, and with our imagined future? Despite such diverse and scattered contributions, the potentialities of “feeling” for the study of fashion are still largely neglected. This edited volume seeks to tease out possible avenues of investigation of the clothed body and its representations through the lens of feeling.
Trade Review“Fashion and Feeling crests a wave of affect-related fashion studies which has gathered with increasing urgency in recent years; in doing so it serves admirably as both theoretical primer and instructive exhibition of the field’s potential avenues of application. … this collection succeeds in inspiring more than it forecloses.” (Alec Holt, Journal of Design History, December 4, 2023)
Table of Contents1.
Introduction.- Feeling Wardrobe Histories.- 2. “Closet Feelings”.- 3. “Militarized Comfort: How to Feel Naked While Wearing Clothes”.-4. “Costume Design and Emotional Communication in 1940s British Cinema”.- 5. “Can Fashion Feel?”.-
Reparative Fashion.- 6. “Designing Clothes For and From Love: Disability Justice and Fashion Hacking”.- 7. “Beading is Medicine: Beading as a Therapeutic and Decolonial Practice” .- 8. “All that Cloth Can Carry (on a Queer Body)”.- 9. “Looking Like a Woman, Feeling Like a Woman, Sensing the Self: Affective and Emotional Dimensions of Dress Therapy”.-
Stasis and Transformation in Fashion.- 10. “Dirty Pretty Things: Stains, Ambivalence and the Traces of Feeling”.- 11. “Making Peace Sensational: Designs for the Nobel Prizes”.- 12. “Glamour Magick, Affective Witchcraft, and Occult Fashion-abilities”.- 13. “Fashion Studies at a Turning Point”.-
Affective Embodiment in Media.- 14. “Melancholy Fashion in Aotearoa New Zealand”.- 15. “On Boredom and Contemporary Fashion Photography”.- 16. “Hair Dressing: Fetish, School Uniforms and
Shōjo in ‘Cocoon Entwined’”.- 17. “What’s Getting Us Through:
Grazia UK as Affective Intimate Public During the Coronavirus Pandemic”.- 18.
Afterword.
