Pub Date : 2022-10-01DOI: 10.1215/00138282-9890736
J. Garrity, Celia Marshik
The introduction traces the long history of fashion’s movement across cultural, national, and political borders. After brief case studies of early twentieth-century French and Spanish styles imagining fashion as an engine of transnational amity, the introduction highlights how fashion navigates some of the most troubled borders of recent years, including the conflict between Russia and Ukraine and racial violence. Fashion forces viewers and consumers to choose sides, whether through national identification or through recognition of the long history of black and brown bodies producing fashionable objects. To advance the global history of fashion, the introduction briefly discusses the work of designers Rawan Maki (Bahrain), Laurence Leenaert (Belgium), and Kim Jones (Great Britain), examining how each upends gender, race, class, or fashion binaries, and analyzes how LVMH and Uniqlo, brands at opposite ends of the contemporary style spectrum, underline the very different ways in which fashion traverses the globe in the twenty-first century. The introduction concludes with the hope that this issue will raise questions about fashion’s articulation of the relation among the local, the national, and the global, as well as about the human experience of interacting with the fashion industry in one national context while living in a globalized world.
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Pub Date : 2022-10-01DOI: 10.1215/00138282-9890791
Heidi Brevik-Zender
In The Lives of Loréna (Les vies de Loréna, 2020), the Mauritian novelist Christine Duvergé chronicles the unraveling of her titular protagonist’s seemingly ideal existence while weaving together a double critique of the global fashion industry and Trump-era conservatism in the American heartland. This article focuses on the novel’s sociopolitical critiques, which find expression in expensive fashions and the abusive labor practices of the American overseas apparel industry. Described by Duvergé as a “subversive fairytale,” the novel illuminates a transnational network of capitalist greed, which powers the global clothing chain in which Mauritius has served historically as a vital, if exploited, link. Duvergé humanizes the poverty and physical suffering of garment workers in Mauritius, foregrounding imbalances and interdependencies characterizing today’s global apparel industry. As a North-South border-crossing narrative that integrates the protagonist’s memories of her homeland into how she experiences life in the United States, The Lives of Loréna is a timely addition to contemporary Indian Ocean French-language literature, which is, as Françoise Lionnet and Emmanuel Bruno Jean-François have stated, “producing locally grounded writing with global ambitions.”
{"title":"Critiquing the Global Clothing Chain in Mauritius","authors":"Heidi Brevik-Zender","doi":"10.1215/00138282-9890791","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00138282-9890791","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 In The Lives of Loréna (Les vies de Loréna, 2020), the Mauritian novelist Christine Duvergé chronicles the unraveling of her titular protagonist’s seemingly ideal existence while weaving together a double critique of the global fashion industry and Trump-era conservatism in the American heartland. This article focuses on the novel’s sociopolitical critiques, which find expression in expensive fashions and the abusive labor practices of the American overseas apparel industry. Described by Duvergé as a “subversive fairytale,” the novel illuminates a transnational network of capitalist greed, which powers the global clothing chain in which Mauritius has served historically as a vital, if exploited, link. Duvergé humanizes the poverty and physical suffering of garment workers in Mauritius, foregrounding imbalances and interdependencies characterizing today’s global apparel industry. As a North-South border-crossing narrative that integrates the protagonist’s memories of her homeland into how she experiences life in the United States, The Lives of Loréna is a timely addition to contemporary Indian Ocean French-language literature, which is, as Françoise Lionnet and Emmanuel Bruno Jean-François have stated, “producing locally grounded writing with global ambitions.”","PeriodicalId":43905,"journal":{"name":"ENGLISH LANGUAGE NOTES","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46974170","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-10-01DOI: 10.1215/00138282-9890769
L. Sanders
This essay examines a multicolored woolen shawl owned by the poet Emily Dickinson. Contemporary writings from the period referred to such textiles as “India shawls,” although the provenance of Dickinson’s shawl is unknown. India shawls frequently appear in sources ranging from advertisements to fashion columns to fiction, but as often as not, the modifier India is emptied of its meaning and extrapolated, by association, to shawls made in Europe and elsewhere. The shawl’s true site of origin in Kashmir is thus obscured by the process through which India comes to bear the weight of Orientalist commodification for a market of female consumers. This essay traces the literary, historical, cultural, social, and economic significance of both Kashmiri and European shawls, reading them alongside the production of cotton textiles and in the larger context of transnational and transoceanic networks of imperial commodity culture. Drawing on the poet’s references to shawls and fabrics as well as on the qualities of the textile itself, this essay takes Dickinson’s shawl as a starting point from which to begin unraveling the tangled threads that make up the production and consumption of one particularly fashionable nineteenth-century garment.
{"title":"Emily Dickinson’s Shawl","authors":"L. Sanders","doi":"10.1215/00138282-9890769","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00138282-9890769","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This essay examines a multicolored woolen shawl owned by the poet Emily Dickinson. Contemporary writings from the period referred to such textiles as “India shawls,” although the provenance of Dickinson’s shawl is unknown. India shawls frequently appear in sources ranging from advertisements to fashion columns to fiction, but as often as not, the modifier India is emptied of its meaning and extrapolated, by association, to shawls made in Europe and elsewhere. The shawl’s true site of origin in Kashmir is thus obscured by the process through which India comes to bear the weight of Orientalist commodification for a market of female consumers. This essay traces the literary, historical, cultural, social, and economic significance of both Kashmiri and European shawls, reading them alongside the production of cotton textiles and in the larger context of transnational and transoceanic networks of imperial commodity culture. Drawing on the poet’s references to shawls and fabrics as well as on the qualities of the textile itself, this essay takes Dickinson’s shawl as a starting point from which to begin unraveling the tangled threads that make up the production and consumption of one particularly fashionable nineteenth-century garment.","PeriodicalId":43905,"journal":{"name":"ENGLISH LANGUAGE NOTES","volume":"58 7-8","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41309752","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-10-01DOI: 10.1215/00138282-9890780
R. Banerjee
Most accounts of E. M. Forster recall him as a dowdy man in a suit, someone Lytton Strachey nicknamed “the Taupe” for his restricted sartorial palette. The ability to wear unfashionable clothes without causing remark is an exercise of privilege that Forster became aware of during his time working for the Red Cross (1916–19), and through interactions with his Egyptian friend, Mohamed El-Adl. Refusing to wear his uniform after work, Forster broke away from convention to wear one of the three suits he had brought with him to Egypt even as he embarked on a difficult love affair with El-Adl. Their clothes-based interactions prompted Forster to question and discard many of his colonialist biases. The suit, previously an unexamined everyday object, thus becomes a loaded metaphor for social privilege and unwilling complicity with national politics in Forster’s essay “Me, Them and You” (1925). The sartorial symbols that emerge from his letters, essays, and the archive he created of El-Adl’s notes allow us to reapproach the philosophical idea with which he is most closely associated: liberal humanism. This essay finally suggests that Forster’s experiences in Egypt led to an intersectional humanist position that holds interest for global modernist approaches.
{"title":"Fashions and Wars","authors":"R. Banerjee","doi":"10.1215/00138282-9890780","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00138282-9890780","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Most accounts of E. M. Forster recall him as a dowdy man in a suit, someone Lytton Strachey nicknamed “the Taupe” for his restricted sartorial palette. The ability to wear unfashionable clothes without causing remark is an exercise of privilege that Forster became aware of during his time working for the Red Cross (1916–19), and through interactions with his Egyptian friend, Mohamed El-Adl. Refusing to wear his uniform after work, Forster broke away from convention to wear one of the three suits he had brought with him to Egypt even as he embarked on a difficult love affair with El-Adl. Their clothes-based interactions prompted Forster to question and discard many of his colonialist biases. The suit, previously an unexamined everyday object, thus becomes a loaded metaphor for social privilege and unwilling complicity with national politics in Forster’s essay “Me, Them and You” (1925). The sartorial symbols that emerge from his letters, essays, and the archive he created of El-Adl’s notes allow us to reapproach the philosophical idea with which he is most closely associated: liberal humanism. This essay finally suggests that Forster’s experiences in Egypt led to an intersectional humanist position that holds interest for global modernist approaches.","PeriodicalId":43905,"journal":{"name":"ENGLISH LANGUAGE NOTES","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45052381","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-10-01DOI: 10.1215/00138282-9890824
Ann Rea
Contrary to the claims of advertising, the Aran sweater is a wholly modern phenomenon; because it emerged in the early twentieth century, however, it became a symbol of authentic Irish identity, imbued with qualities that resist commercialization and industrial production and that even provide links to premodern rural culture that the Irish diaspora strips away. While postcolonial postmodernity may render authentic culture unfeasible, contemporary advertising intensifies the mystification and romanticization of the Aran sweater, even with the garment’s increasing machine production.
{"title":"Convoluted Yarns","authors":"Ann Rea","doi":"10.1215/00138282-9890824","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00138282-9890824","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Contrary to the claims of advertising, the Aran sweater is a wholly modern phenomenon; because it emerged in the early twentieth century, however, it became a symbol of authentic Irish identity, imbued with qualities that resist commercialization and industrial production and that even provide links to premodern rural culture that the Irish diaspora strips away. While postcolonial postmodernity may render authentic culture unfeasible, contemporary advertising intensifies the mystification and romanticization of the Aran sweater, even with the garment’s increasing machine production.","PeriodicalId":43905,"journal":{"name":"ENGLISH LANGUAGE NOTES","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49424298","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-10-01DOI: 10.1215/00138282-9890758
Melissa Dinsman
Abstract:Over the span of almost fifty years the British author Mollie Panter-Downes contributed 852 pieces to the New Yorker; this included 153 London Letters during World War II alone. In these Panter-Downes reported on the “everyday” aspects of the British home front experience, including fashion accessories such as the gas-mask case and lipstick. This essay argues that Panter-Downes’s inclusion of these wartime commodities served two purposes. First, she shows how fashion was part of the “total war” culture in Britain, where war equipment (like the gas mask) was sold to British women, but also how a domestic purchase (like lipstick) became a weapon of war. The second and purposely camouflaged result of Panter-Downes’s descriptions of wartime capitalism was to market the war to New Yorker readers to garner American sympathy for, and support of, Britain’s ongoing struggle.
{"title":"Marketing Masks and Makeup in Mollie Panter-Downes’s “Letter from London”","authors":"Melissa Dinsman","doi":"10.1215/00138282-9890758","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00138282-9890758","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Over the span of almost fifty years the British author Mollie Panter-Downes contributed 852 pieces to the New Yorker; this included 153 London Letters during World War II alone. In these Panter-Downes reported on the “everyday” aspects of the British home front experience, including fashion accessories such as the gas-mask case and lipstick. This essay argues that Panter-Downes’s inclusion of these wartime commodities served two purposes. First, she shows how fashion was part of the “total war” culture in Britain, where war equipment (like the gas mask) was sold to British women, but also how a domestic purchase (like lipstick) became a weapon of war. The second and purposely camouflaged result of Panter-Downes’s descriptions of wartime capitalism was to market the war to New Yorker readers to garner American sympathy for, and support of, Britain’s ongoing struggle.","PeriodicalId":43905,"journal":{"name":"ENGLISH LANGUAGE NOTES","volume":"60 1","pages":"37 - 48"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43602923","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-10-01DOI: 10.1215/00138282-9890802
Rawan Maki
Abstract:What makes fashion “local”? What makes it “sustainable”? Can non-Western fashion locales have the same definitions of sustainability espoused by the global industry? This article reflects on a fashion “sustainability” for Bahrain and the Arab Gulf that goes beyond a focus on product. Specifically, the article explores how fashion space is used in Bahrain by different groups, as well as equity of experience and phenomenology of these spaces in Bahrain. Fashion spaces—such as the mall or souk—are primary areas of public gathering in the Gulf. Based on the results of qualitative interviews and a Delphi study, this article puts forward the example of fashion spaces and tailoring in Bahrain, where an expanded definition of use is found in Gulf fashion practice when compared to the traditional “life cycle” view used in fashion sustainability discourse. These differences in fashion ontology compared to a Western context impact what could be considered true “innovation” in the case of the Arab Gulf. For instance, cocreation through tailoring in the Gulf is culturally prevalent and a default feature of existing material culture, whereas similar notions are classified in a context of “innovation” in Western discourse. Thus it becomes crucial to explore an Arab Gulf ontology of fashion as a precursor to its “sustainability” and honest discussion of its own transformation toward sustainability.
{"title":"Local Ontology and Lived Experience of Fashion toward a Gulf Fashion “Sustainability”","authors":"Rawan Maki","doi":"10.1215/00138282-9890802","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00138282-9890802","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:What makes fashion “local”? What makes it “sustainable”? Can non-Western fashion locales have the same definitions of sustainability espoused by the global industry? This article reflects on a fashion “sustainability” for Bahrain and the Arab Gulf that goes beyond a focus on product. Specifically, the article explores how fashion space is used in Bahrain by different groups, as well as equity of experience and phenomenology of these spaces in Bahrain. Fashion spaces—such as the mall or souk—are primary areas of public gathering in the Gulf. Based on the results of qualitative interviews and a Delphi study, this article puts forward the example of fashion spaces and tailoring in Bahrain, where an expanded definition of use is found in Gulf fashion practice when compared to the traditional “life cycle” view used in fashion sustainability discourse. These differences in fashion ontology compared to a Western context impact what could be considered true “innovation” in the case of the Arab Gulf. For instance, cocreation through tailoring in the Gulf is culturally prevalent and a default feature of existing material culture, whereas similar notions are classified in a context of “innovation” in Western discourse. Thus it becomes crucial to explore an Arab Gulf ontology of fashion as a precursor to its “sustainability” and honest discussion of its own transformation toward sustainability.","PeriodicalId":43905,"journal":{"name":"ENGLISH LANGUAGE NOTES","volume":"60 1","pages":"106 - 120"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48015005","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-10-01DOI: 10.1215/00138282-9890835
R. Garelick
Abstract:When Karl Lagerfeld took over the Maison Chanel in 1983, its founder, Coco Chanel, had been dead for twelve years, and the iconic brand was foundering. Once the epitome of French glamour, history, and feminine luxury, the house was rapidly losing prestige and relevance. Lagerfeld revived the brand through a complex reinterpretation of its iconography, its founder’s persona, and especially its relationship to French identity and patrimoine culturel—cultural patrimony. His reign at Chanel amounted to a de facto commentary on nationality, personality, style, and gender, demonstrating how history and politics get filtered and expressed through fashion.
{"title":"Lagerfeld, Fashion, and Cultural Heritage","authors":"R. Garelick","doi":"10.1215/00138282-9890835","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00138282-9890835","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:When Karl Lagerfeld took over the Maison Chanel in 1983, its founder, Coco Chanel, had been dead for twelve years, and the iconic brand was foundering. Once the epitome of French glamour, history, and feminine luxury, the house was rapidly losing prestige and relevance. Lagerfeld revived the brand through a complex reinterpretation of its iconography, its founder’s persona, and especially its relationship to French identity and patrimoine culturel—cultural patrimony. His reign at Chanel amounted to a de facto commentary on nationality, personality, style, and gender, demonstrating how history and politics get filtered and expressed through fashion.","PeriodicalId":43905,"journal":{"name":"ENGLISH LANGUAGE NOTES","volume":"60 1","pages":"156 - 174"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43756624","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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