the neophile

“Fashion not only confirms and economically functionalizes the division of gender and class; it constructs and subverts them by stripping them bare – if this clothing metaphor is allowed here – and reveals them as an effect of construction.” Barbara Vinken in Fashion Zeitgeist: Trends and Cycles in the Fashion System, trans. M. Hewson (Oxford: Berg, 2005), 4.

For further reading, please also check Joanne Entwistle’s The fashioned body : fashion, dress and modern social theory (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000). Please see below for a short clip that was broadcasted on German television in Die Sendung mit der Maus (English: The Program with the Mouse).

“Nobody really knows anymore, especially in the U.S., what couture is. […] They’ll say, ‘This couture dress by Ralph Lauren,’ and I’m like, ‘No. NO.’” Valerie Steele, fashion historian and curator, in:

Binkley, Christina. “Fashion Journal: So What Does ‘Couture’ Mean, Anyway?“, Wall Street Journal. April 26, 2007.

For a proper definition of ‘haute couture’, read this chapter.

Subsequent to my guest entry on the German fashion blog Lesmads.de in November 2010,  I was repeatedly contacted by various students regarding academic literature on fashion bloggers and on fashion blogging. Recently, a worth reading article by scholar Agnès Rocamora – entitled ”Personal Fashion Blogs: Screens and Mirrors in Digital Self-portraits” – has been published in Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture (04/2011).