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- Convenor:
-
Joshua Bluteau
(Coventry University)
Send message to Convenor
- Format:
- Panel
- Location:
- Room 109, Teaching & Learning Building (TLB)
- Sessions:
- Friday 11 April, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
As the behemothic fashion industry continues to grow, this panel will discuss how anthropologists and fashion scholars can converge, asking fundamental questions about what we wear, how, and why – crafting a new intersectional space to understand a global industry that shapes our very identity.
Long Abstract:
Anthropologists have long been fascinated by what their interlocutors wear and the social meaning ascribed and performed through objects that adorn the body. Since the earliest ethnographic fieldwork, these objects have been collected and admired, offering inspiration to anthropologists and designers alike. In the 21st century, the global fashion industry is worth in excess of a trillion USD and employs millions of people. Yet this industry is beset by inequality, environmental concerns and hegemonic value-signalling. Despite this, fashion offers an optic for considering fundamental anthropological questions surrounding identity, selfhood, production, gender, race and economics. This panel calls for papers that engage with all aspects of the convergence of Fashion and Anthropology, and welcomes submissions from fashion scholars and the social sciences. Together we will explore how we might fashion anthropology itself as we cast a collective gaze on the intersection of these two subjects that ask the same question: what does it look like to be human?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 11 April, 2025, -Paper Short Abstract:
Social media’s focus on novelty has driven fashion design toward attention-grabbing “createmic” ideas, at the cost of “valuableness”—utility, craftsmanship, and emotional depth. This leads to designs lacking cultural/personal meaning. Anthropology offers ways to reclaim deeper creativity in fashion.
Paper Abstract:
The advent of social media and the “attention economy”, coupled with ever-increasing commercial pressures, has made salience, novelty and “dopamine activation” in fashion design paramount. Ideas and imagery that are both novel and counterintuitive—two of the three requisites of any creative idea that can jointly be termed “createmic”—are known experimentally to stimulate the brain’s reward system, and a selection process in social media is under way that elevates such striking and often surprising designs at the expense of designs that possess valuableness—the third of the three requisites of creativity. Valuableness in fashion design means designs that are effective, useful, adaptive, emotionally evocative, well-made, and trustworthy. This privileging of “createmity” at the expense of valuableness also minimises the kind of cultural drivers and authentic personal meanings that drove Coco Chanel and Alexander McQueen to produce their inventive and impactful designs. The relentless imperative to catch consumers’ attention is effectively leading to more “meaningless” clothing with merely metasemiotic significance—designs that primarily reference other designs rather than cueing deeper culturally embedded resonances and personal (i.e. the designer’s) experience. Anthropology, as the most broadly human of all the academic disciplines, is best placed to make sense of this development in human fashion as well as to point to ways of making fashion more personally and culturally meaningful. While createmity cannot realistically be abandoned, new routes must be found that magnify valuableness if fashion design is to attain a richer form of creativity.
Paper Short Abstract:
Donning clothes made by ones interlocutors can tell us much about the relationship between body and cloth. Ethnographic wearing takes us a step further and asks what this process can tell us as anthropologists about the world around us
Paper Abstract:
This paper depicts a research practice developed by the author called ethnographic wearing and uses it to problematize the wearer as a contested body - part research tool, part incidental corporeal entity. Set against a landscape of the social media gaze on ‘fashionable’ bodies this paper asks how wearing artefacts in the field can tell us something new about the garments themselves, and the nature of the world around them. With a particular focus on suiting - cast as a problematic icon of maleness - this paper explores the ways in which bodies are crafted and performed by the fabric draped over them and asks whether we, as anthropologists, can understand this process without donning such apparel ourselves. Weaving a narrative of commodity fetishism, online social media style accounts and tailors shops, this paper strides through the ever-blurring boundaries of modern masculinities to look at the performativity of the research themselves and their wardrobe as a site of ethnographic encounter.