Canadian Critical Luxury Studies: Decentering Luxury is a dynamic new contribution to the study of luxury. The essays in this collection challenge Euro- and US-centric perceptions that bind luxury to either a colonial past or a consumerist present. The book announces a new collective of thinkers who focus on Indigenous and Canadian instances of luxurious production experiences and sites to propose a new definition of luxury that includes a plurality of regional practices highlighting that Canadian luxury centres on community and connection.

Each of the interdisciplinary contributions analyse luxury from different vantage points to understand why luxury has succeeded or failed in the Canadian context. From the history of the fur trade to the latest Indigenous fashion movement from the T. Eaton Co.’s 1920s Made-in-Canada campaign to the on-again-off-again Toronto Fashion Week from Vancouver public art commissions to Montréal’s future-forward fashiontech sector the essays in this volume explain what makes and breaks Canadian luxury.

These original case studies redefine luxury for Canada – a former colonial possession and contemporary second-tier cultural market – and lay the foundation for the critical study of luxury in other historically secondary geographies that produce consume and circulate material and symbolic luxuries. The collection ultimately challenges old myths and the mystique surrounding European luxury to give it a new lustre that shines light on those actors who have been historically excluded from its privilege: Indigenous peoples immigrants the working classes. It sheds light on the reasons that conventional expressions of luxury may fail in secondary markets and offers guidance for fashiontech innovations that invest in the individual without imposing dehumanizing values of efficiency and rational measurement.

Although focused on the Canadian context the book will appeal to an international audience of scholarly and industry readers. Its interventions about broadening the focus of luxury studies beyond traditional sites in Western Europe make it an important text for global audiences. It offers an alternate reading of conventional luxury histories sites and practices; in doing so it models a national approach to luxury that can be applied to alternate national markets.

Jessica P. Clark is a historian of Britain and empire with a focus on gender consumption and labour and an associate professor of history at Brock University Ontario Canada. Nigel Lezama is an associate professor of French studies at Brock University and works at the intersection of fashion luxury literary and cultural studies.

Contributions are drawn from a number of fields including but not limited to Indigenous studies museum studies business management cultural studies fashion studies technology and industry. Contributors include Kathryn Franklin University of Toronto; Rebecca Halliday Toronto Metropolitan University; Riley Kucheran Toronto Metropolitan University; Valérie Lamontagne Concordia University; Marie O'Mahony Ontario College of Art and Design; Julia Polyck-O'Neill York University Ontario.

This is a primarily an academic book. It is of great relevance to scholars within the subfield of critical luxury studies as well as scholars of consumer and commodity cultures more broadly and those working or interested in Canadian studies media studies critical studies and historians.

Researchers and postgraduate students studying luxury as well as those studying the history of the development of Canada its colonial past and the marginalization of Indigenous people and with the development of fashion technologies will also find it useful.

Academics and practitioners concerned with the development of city and nation branding will find the book of value.

This new edited collection assembles academic essays and intellectual activism equally next to visual essays and artistic interventions and proposes a different concept for fashion research that eschews the traditional logic of academic fashion studies. It features acclaimed designers artists curators and theorists whose work investigates the multi-faceted debates on the rise of practice-based research in fashion.

The book sets out to explore current issues in fashion research with a particular focus on both methodology and expansion of the field to encompass overlooked voices and narratives. It has a particular concern with the relationships between theory and practice and with how knowledge is created and disseminated in fashion studies. It is an excellent and really valuable contribution to the field at a point both when fashion studies is expanding and when the fashion industry is at a crucial point of change.

Some of the contributions were originally presented at a symposium hosted by the Austrian Center for Fashion Research ‘TALKSHOW: The politics of practice-based fashion research’ at Vienna’s Museum of Applied Arts curated by Wally Salner. The symposium brought together a group of fashion scholars designers educators and practitioners to explore critical contemporary fashion (research) practices and to investigate critical fashion knowledge between theory and practice beyond assumed disciplinary and epistemological boundaries. Many contributions in this volume were initially presented at that symposium while others are testimonies of international debates that were part of the research activities of the Austrian Center for Fashion Research a research project funded by the Austrian Federal Ministry of Science Research and Economy led by Elke Gaugele.

The book is structured into three sections: Fashion Knowledge Practice-Based Fashion Research and Sites of Fashion and Politics. Contributions look at new forms of fashion knowledge that are forming with and along shifting fashion practices practice-based fashion research and sheds light on different sites and entanglements of fashion and politics in distinctive contemporary and historical moments of de/colonization anti/racism and anti/globalization.

Elke Gaugele is cultural anthropologist and professor of fashion styles and contextual design at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna Austria. Monica Titton is a sociologist fashion theorist and senior scientist at the fashion design department of the University of Applied Arts Vienna Austria. Other contributions are from Elke Bippus Astrid Engl Jojo Gronostay Ruby Hoette Bianca Koczan Priska Morger NCCFN Wally Salner Andreas Spiegl José Teunissen Lara Torres Carol Tulloch and Maria Ziegelböck

Readers will be academics practitioners designers artists curators museums theoretical scholars lecturers practice-based researchers students and practitioners at all levels in the fields of fashion textile art and design.

This new book with its original focus on practice-based research will be useful for a general and academic readership alike and to all those working within the field of fashion studies including those with a theoretical focus fashion practitioners and those working within innovative pockets of the fashion industry. 

This volume presents a collection of the most recent knowledge on the relationship between gender and fashion in historical and contemporary contexts. Through fourteen essays divided into three segments – how dress creates disrupts and transcends gender – the chapters investigate gender issues through the lens of fashion. Crossing Gender Boundaries first examines how clothing has been and continues to be used to create and maintain the binary gender division that has come to permeate Western and westernized cultures. Next it explores how dress can be used to contest and subvert binary gender expectations before a final section that considers the meaning of gender and how dress can transcend it focusing on unisex and genderless clothing.

The essays consider how fashion can both constrict and free gender expression explore the ways dress and gender are products of one other and illuminate the construction of gender through social norms. Readers will find that through analysis of the relationship between gender and fashion they gain a better understanding of the world around them.

Los Angeles is undergoing a makeover. Leaving behind its image as all freeways and suburbs sunshine and noir it is reinventing itself for the twenty-first century as a walkable pedestrian friendly ecologically healthy and global urban hotspot of fashion and style  while driving initiatives to rejuvenate its downtown core public spaces and ethnic neighborhoods. By providing a locational history of Los Angeles fashion and style mythologies through the lens of institutions such as manufacturing museums and designers and readings of contemporary film literature and new media L.A. Chic provides an in-depth analysis of the social changes urban processes desires and politics that inform how the good life is being re-imagined in Los Angeles.

 

Throughout the book Susan Ingram and Markus Reisenleitner dig up submerged and marginalized elements of the city’s cultural history but also tap into the global circuits of urban affect that are being mobilized for promoting L.A. as an example for the global multi-ethnic city of the future. Engagingly written highly visual and featuring numerous photographs throughout L.A. Chic will appeal to any culturally inclined reader with an interest in Los Angeles its cultural history and modern urban style.

It was a scene that had many names: some original members referred to themselves as punks others new romantics new wavers the bats or the morbids. 'Goth' did not gain lexical currency until the late 1980s. But no matter what term was used 'postpunk' encompasses all the incarnations of the 1980s alternative movement. Some Wear Leather Some Wear Lace is a visual and oral history of the first decade of the scene. Featuring interviews with both the performers and the audience to capture the community on and off stage the book places personal snapshots alongside professional photography to reveal a unique range of fashions bands and scenes.



A book about the music the individual and the creativity of a worldwide community rather than theoretical definitions of a subculture Some Wear Leather Some Wear Lace considers a subject not often covered by academic books. Whether you were part of the scene or are just fascinated by different modes of expression this book will transport you to another time and place.

Critical Studies in Fashion and Beauty is the first journal dedicated to the critical examination of the fashion and the beauty systems as symbolic spaces of production and reproduction representation and communication of artifacts meanings social practices and visual or textual renditions of cloth clothing and appearance.