Critical Studies in Fashion & Beauty
Critical Studies in Fashion & Beauty (Journal)
Critical Studies in Fashion & Beauty is the first peer-reviewed journal dedicated to a critical examination of the fashion and beauty systems as symbolic spaces of production and reproduction, representation and communication of artefacts, meanings and social practices. It also explores visual or textual renditions of cloth, clothing and appearance.
Principal Editor
Efrat Tseëlon
Professor of Fashion Theory, University of Leeds
e.tseelon@leeds.ac.uk
Editor
Diana Crane
University of Pennsylvania, USA
craneher@sas.upenn.edu
Critical Studies in Fashion & Beauty is the first journal dedicated to the critical examination of fashion and beauty systems as symbolic spaces of production and reproduction, representation and communication of artefacts, meanings, social practices, and visual or textual renditions of cloth, clothing and appearance. All articles are double-blind peer-reviewed in order to maintain the highest standards of scholastic integrity.
Principal Editor
Efrat Tseëlon
Professor of Fashion Theory, University of Leeds
e.tseelon@leeds.ac.uk
Editor
Diana Crane
University of Pennsylvania, USA
craneher@sas.upenn.edu
Principal Editor
Efrat Tseëlon
Professor of Fashion Theory, University of Leeds
e.tseelon@leeds.ac.uk
Editor
Diana Crane
University of Pennsylvania, USA
craneher@sas.upenn.edu
Principal Editor
Efrat Tseëlon
Professor of Fashion Theory, University of Leeds
e.tseelon@leeds.ac.uk
Editor
Diana Crane
University of Pennsylvania, USA
craneher@sas.upenn.edu
The Field
We are witnessing an increasing scholarly interest in the body as a focus of cultural texts and an intersection of discourses on fashion and beauty inspired by the work of feminist theory, art history, film criticism, cultural theory, and social theory. The body has increasingly featured as a site for grounding discourses of practice (management and care, presentation and adornment) as well as meaning (symbolic, semiotic and ideological) of a personal and collective kind. The body and its presentations constitute a dialectical cultural sign encoding simultaneously the material and the socially constructed, the personal (subjectivity) and the collective (identity), the visual and the conceptual.
Fashion and beauty constitute a central discourse about the body and its presentation. They provide a system that:
- registers, defines and encodes meanings of practices and processes via concrete as well as symbolic objects.
- crosses disciplinary boundaries of aesthetics (film, art and design), humanities (literature, history) social science (sociology, anthropology, material culture) and cultural studies (media, popular culture, consumer culture).
- constitutes both a subject matter and a critical lens through which to read ideological components of cultural texts.
While always capturing the imagination of philosophers and thinkers from Carlyle to Loos, and from Veblen to Flügel, fashion and beauty have never quite occupied a mainstream space. Being branded trivial, superficial and feminine affairs they have only recently gained entry to the pantheon of social and academic respectability with the aid of thinkers such as Barthes, Baudrillard, Bourdieu and Lipovetsky.
The postmodern turn saw the rise of media, popular culture, material culture, women studies and cultural studies as disciplines for academic research; the topic of fashion and appearance found a natural home there. But it has also gained ground in established disciplines such as sociology, anthropology, psychology, history and literature, and of course it is in the specialised disciplines such as textiles and clothing, or art and design that fashion and beauty have carved a respectable niche.
The Journal
There is a real need for a dedicated and truly interdisciplinary international journal which goes beyond ethnography, description and analysis to critique. What is needed is a venue for critical and creative engagement with fashion and beauty concepts and practices, which explores meanings, interrogates their ideological lining, and places them in a wider theoretical context.
The proposed journal will provide space for critical examination of the fashion system and the beauty system as systems of production, reproduction and representation of artifacts, social practices, visual or textual renditions of cloth, clothing and modes of personal appearance that acquire symbolic values in production, communication and use. It will focus on issues of power, social positioning, ideologies, discourses and practices within the web of relationships between creators and producers, communicators, practitioners and end-users of “fashion and beauty cultural goods”.
The journal seeks to segment the “fashion and beauty scholarship” market in a distinctive way that allows different subject matters (normally not accommodated within the remit of one journal) to feature as long as they adhere to the journal's two distinctive focal points:
- In terms of approach: a focus on a critical analysis of the assumptions underlying the discourse of fashion and personal appearance in relation to systems of power (to include social relations between established (gender, class, ethnic group), transient (music or youth fashion tribes), or single issue groups). As such it can accommodate and incorporate new developments in the fashion practice and research (such as recent process emerging out of globalisation and economic recession).
- In terms of perspective: a focus on the fashion system and the beauty system as a collective process for the production, dissemination and use of cultural goods with symbolic meanings (to include object, image, and text (as in journalism, literature, history, film and art). “Fashion” here is broadly defined to include cloth and clothing: traditional, iconic, functional or fashionable, everyday or “occasion” dressing).
The journal welcomes the creative combination of theoretical approaches to exploring cultural products, practices and meanings, both conventional and original, and the use of a range of methods to collect evidence (from the literary and the historical to the sociological and anthropological; from the focus on samples to the privileging of paradigmatic cases) and to analyse the evidence (symbolic, semiotic, discursive, interpretive or statistical).
The journal invites 1-page abstract submissions on the following themes:
- technologies of identity
- masquerade
- ethical systems
- cultural discourse
- social control
- means of subjugation/empowerment
- local/global meaning systems
Submissions should be sent to the Editors (contact details are given on the journal's homepage).
Journal contributors will receive a free PDF copy of their final work upon publication. Print copies of the journal may also be purchased by contributors at half price.
Principal Editor
Efrat Tseëlon
Professor of Fashion Theory, University of Leeds
e.tseelon@leeds.ac.uk
Editor
Diana Crane
University of Pennsylvania, USA
craneher@sas.upenn.edu
Advisory Board
Kenneth Gergen
Swarthmore College
Sander L. Gilman
Emory University
Daniel Miller
University College London
Francesco Morace
Future Concept Lab
Susie Orbach
London School of Economics
Jonathan Schroeder
Rochester Institute of Technology Rochester
Michael Solomon
Saint Joseph's University in Philadelphia
Editorial Board
Laura Bovone
Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Italy
Hazel Clark
Parsons The New School for Design
Sheila Cliffe
Jumonji Gakuen Women’s University
Peter Corrigan
University of New England
Maxine Craig
University of California at Davis
Joanne Entwistle
King’s College London, UK
Joanne Finkelstein
University of Greenwich
Tom Fisher
Nottingham Trent University
Ana Marta González
Universidad de Navarra
Maria da Graça Guedes
University of Minho
Elisabeth Hackspiel-Mikosch
Niederrhein University of Applied Science
Karen Tranberg Hansen
Northwestern University
Kathleen M Higgins
The University of Texas at Austin
Laura Hurd Clarke
University of British Columbia
Susan Kaiser
University of California at Davis
Linda M Scott
Said Business School
Simona Segre Reinach
Bologna University, Italy
Lise Skov
Copenhagen Business School
Anneke Smelik
Radboud University, the Netherlands
Patrícia Soley-Beltran
University of Edinburgh
Alkeline van Lenning
Tilburg University
Sílvia Ventosa
Chief Curator of Barcelona's Textile Museum
Sophie Woodward
University of Manchester
Principal Editor
Efrat Tseëlon
Professor of Fashion Theory, University of Leeds
e.tseelon@leeds.ac.uk
Editor
Diana Crane
University of Pennsylvania, USA
craneher@sas.upenn.edu
Contents
- Volume (9): Issue (1)
- Cover date: 2018
Contents
- Volume (8): Issue (1)
- Cover date: 2017
Contents
- Volume (8): Issue (2)
- Cover date: 2017
Contents
- Volume (7): Issue (1)
- Cover date: 2016
Contents
- Volume (7): Issue (2)
- Cover date: 2016
Contents
- Volume (6): Issue (1)
- Cover date: 2015
Contents
- Volume (6): Issue (2)
- Cover date: 2015
Contents
- Volume (5): Issue (1)
- Cover date: 2014
Contents
- Volume (5): Issue (2)
- Cover date: 2014
Contents
- Volume (4): Issue (1)
- Cover date: 2013
Contents
- Volume (3): Issue (1)
- Cover date: 2012
Contents
- Volume (2): Issue (1)
- Cover date: 2011
Contents
- Volume (1): Issue (1)
- Cover date: 2010
Contents
- Volume (1): Issue (2)
- Cover date: 2010
Principal Editor
Efrat Tseëlon
Professor of Fashion Theory, University of Leeds
e.tseelon@leeds.ac.uk
Editor
Diana Crane
University of Pennsylvania, USA
craneher@sas.upenn.edu
