Publication | Fashion and Materiality

Fashion is intimately tied to the material world. With a focus on diverse cultural practices, this book offers new insights into the dynamic relationships between fashion, bodies, and material culture. In a series of original case studies, both historical and contemporary, the collection explores how fashion and clothing affect articulations of body and self, experiences of time and place, and the shaping of social and local/global relationships.

With chapters from leading international scholars, Fashion and Materiality takes the reader from the study of clothing and biography, and an early modern “foreign dress” collection, to Chinoiserie clothing in 18th-century Europe and fast fashion production in today’s China. The book also examines fashion’s role in nation building, and entanglements between fashion and migration across clothing donations for Syrian refugees in Germany and the circulation of “refugee chic” on international fashion runways. Scrutinizing the dense connections between fashion, clothing, materiality, and humanity, the book shows how the material interacts forcefully with the personal and political.

Table of contents

Introduction: Fashion and Materiality
Heike Jenss and Viola Hofmann 

SECTION 1: FASHION AND CLOTHING – MATERIALS IN TIME AND PLACE
Introduction

1. Material Subjects: Making Place, Making Time through Fashion
Susan Kaiser

2. Dressed Lives: Biography, Emotion, and Materiality
Christel Köhle-Hezinger

3. The Discovery of Materiality: On Archaeological Clothing Finds, Representation and Knowledge Formation 
Daniel Devoucoux

4. Appropriating the World through Clothing: Christoph Kress’ Foreign Dress Collection
Jutta Zander-Seidel

SECTION 2: MATERIALITY IN MOTION – TRANSNATIONAL CIRCUITS OF FASHION
Introduction

5. Chinoiserie in Fashion: Material Images Circulating Between China and Europe
Daniel Purdy

6. Tradition in Fashion: Golden Embroidery and the Crafting of Heritage in Bukhara
Lola Shamukhitdinova

7. “Our Dress”: Chitenge as Zambia’s National Fabric
Karen Tranberg Hansen

8. “Made in China”: Material Meanderings of Fast-Fashion Cities
Christina H. Moon

SECTION 3: MATERIALITY AND EMBODIMENT
Introduction

9. Sensorial Cosmologies: Fashion Design and the Embodied Practices of the Wearer 
Leyla Belkaid-Neri

10. “The Left-Hand Pose”: Alchemic Realism and the Intra-Action of Music, Body, and Dress in Metal Yoga
Otto von Busch

11. “Feeling Premium”: Athleisure and the Material Transformation of Sporting Wear 
Jennifer Craik

SECTION 4: MATERIAL EXCHANGES – FASHION AND MIGRATION
Introduction

12. International Fashion Shows: Creating Transcultural Relationships through Clothing
Andrea Hauser

13. Entangled Histories: Fashion and the Politics of Migration 
Elke Gaugele