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A long tradition -- A feel for tweed -- Saints and rebels -- Land of wool -- Patriotic cloth -- From Donegal to Oxford Street -- The Gaelic revival --Hand weaving steps towards art -- Irish tweed : the headline act -- The call of Irish tweed -- Changing times -- Tweed : 'the most valuable and brilliant facet' -- Riding the waves -- Days of resurgence -- Living legacy -- A final word.

Although it has long been recognized that gay people appear to have a special relationship with fashion and style, this will be the first book to look at the history of fashion through a queer lens and to explore the "gayness" or "queerness" of fashion. The book will explore the importance of gay men as fashion designers from the 1930s to the present, including the contributions to fashion history of gay designers such as Christian Dior, Yves Saint Laurent, and Alexander McQueen. Bisexual and lesbian designers and other fashion professionals will also be considered. In addition, the book will document the creativity and resistance to oppression expressed by LGBTQ (lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgender-queer) sub-cultural styles, which have often transgressed sex and gender norms. Finally, the book will explore the influence of a queer sensibility, queer aesthetic(s), and queer sub-cultural styles on fashion over the past century.

Abstract
Popular media celebrates the iconic Hong Kong dress – the cheongsam; yet, its existence is threatened as Hong Kong's population of master tailors is rapidly dwindling. Hong Kong's fashion identity is closely intertwined with the changing patterns of the global fashion industry. Hong Kong once buzzed with factories supplying the world's wardrobes, but recent developments resulted in the loss of its manufacturing base, and as fashions changed the once ubiquitous cheongsam was consigned to fashion history. With the recent focus on heritage and slow fashion, making has become a key component in fashion marketing. Companies in the United Kingdom and United States are reviving old brands and launching new ones, using abandoned industrial equipment and reinvigorating local economies. This increased focus on country of origin, artisanship and sustainability also offers opportunities for Hong Kong to reposition itself, and this article surveys the contemporary fashion landscape in order to inform a debate on cultural heritage in fashion and its marketing.

"Benjamin on Fashion reconstructs and redefines Walter Benjamin's complex, fragmentary and yet influential fashion theory that he developed in the Arcades Project (1927-1940) and beyond, while situating it within the environment from which it emerged - 1930s Parisian couture. In this insightful new book, Philipp Ekardt brings Benjamin into discussion with a number of important, but frequently overlooked sources. Amongst many others, these include the German fashion critic Helen Grund, who introduced him to the contemporary fashion scene; Georg Simmel's fashion sociology; Henri Focillon's morphological art history; designs by Elsa Schiaparelli and Madeleine Vionnet; films by L'Herbier and others starring Mae West; and the photography of George Hoyningen-Huene and Man Ray. In doing so, Ekardt demonstrates how fashion and silhouettes became grounded in sex; how an ideal of the elegant animation of matter was pitted against the concept of an obdurate fashion form; and how Benjamin's idea of 'fashion's tiger's leap into the past' paralleled the return of 1930s couture to the depths of (fashion) history. The use of such relevant sources makes this crucial for understanding Benjamin both as a thinker and a cultural theorist."--

The exploitation of cheapened migrant and refugee labour has always been central to the material production of fashion. The so-called refugee crisis, when it comes to much of the urban garment industry, is not a crisis, but a key, endemic feature and facilitator of an extreme form of flexibility, which is defined by low skill needs, high seasonal fluctuations and extensive subcontracting, and has remained at the heart of the characteristically volatile fashion production ever since the late-nineteenth-century period of growth to today. Despite this, the concept of 'refugee' has not moved to the forefront of Fashion Studies and journalism — it is still being understood and treated as an exceptional and extraordinary matter of descriptive and legal significance: a product of forced migration, displacement and an overall, so-called crisis. Drawing upon Hannah Arendt's idea that refugees 'driven from country to country represent the vanguard' (1943, p. 274) of all stateless and displaced people, of all racialised and marginalised Others, this paper will aim to expand the meaning of 'the refugee' a) as a recurrent element of the multitude embraced by what Karl Marx calls 'the disposable industrial army', that is, 'a mass of human material always ready for exploitation' (1990 [1867], p. 547) to satisfy the changing needs of the self-expansion of capital, especially during periods of crisis, and b) as a political identity that exposes the structurally exclusive —and no longer sustainable — character of the nation-state as a racialised and territorial myth of European construction. Focusing on the centrality of refugee labour to clothing production in Turkey and the UK, this paper will explore the possibilities of cross-border worker solidarity, transnational unionism and what Jennifer Gordon calls 'transnational labour citizenship', that is, 'an opening up of the fortress of labour and of the nation-state to accommodate a constant flow of new migrants through a model that would tie immigration status to membership in organizations of transnational workers rather than to a particular employer' (2007, p. 509).

MODUS is a platform for expanded fashion practice through Onomatopee Projects, initiated and led by Caroline Stevenson and Ruby Hoette in collaboration with Roland Brauchli. modus: a mode of procedure: a way of doing something Contemporary fashion culture is seeing creative practitioners actively seeking to challenge traditional practices and question the very definition of their discipline. While the mainstream fashion industry continues to uphold commercial boundaries, there are emergent practices that propose alternate value systems and thus different ways of thinking, doing and being fashion. These are expanded fashion practices: experimental methods, curiosity and criticality that have the ability to interrogate the social, cultural, political and environmental impacts of fashion and point to a future that transcends the current capitalist paradigm. MODUS brings together and maps these diverse and rich practices, providing a platform to bridge the divide between theory and practice in fashion. It will facilitate conversations between the practitioners working in this expanded field and writers/theorists from a range of disciplines including sociology, cultural and critical theory, politics and economics to help formulate new perspectives on fashion. MODUS will take various forms from publications to events and workshops – all with the aim to establish an international research network that represents and supports this community of expanded practice.

Utopian 'social dreaming' often imagined societies whose inhabitants made do with relatively few material possessions, including clothing. Such visions of material resourcefulness stand in stark contrast to the currently dominant model of fashion production and consumption in which designers are pushed to meet increasingly faster trend turnarounds and where consumers routinely discard large quantities of fully functional garments. It is clear that this situation is not sustainable, and that fashion future must be radically different. This paper draws upon and expands the research presented in the special issue of the journal Utopian Studies 'Utopia and Fashion' published in early 2018. The issue examined the under-researched relationship between fashion and utopia through the lens of Ruth Levitas' concept of utopia as a method of exploring alternative scenarios for the future. By combining multidisciplinary perspectives from academics and creative practitioners, the issue aimed to trigger a long-term dialogue regarding both the role of fashion in utopian thinking and the potential of utopian thinking to re-imagine and inspire better futures for fashion. The paper has two parts, it first develops selected themes outlined in 'Utopia and Fashion' and demonstrates how utopian thinking can provide a helpful tool for addressing some of the dilemmas and challenges involved in the current discourse on fashion and sustainability. In the second part, the paper employs the metaphor of One Dress, a utopian vision of one garment for life, that helps unravel the complexities that underlie fashion's agency on individual, social and political levels. The paper argues that this inherent complexity of fashion demands stronger activist agendas in both design education and consumer behaviour in order to negotiate future solutions that embrace a holistic perspective on fashion as a system at the intersection of power, nature, culture and society.

Since forming their creative partnership in 1992, Dutch fashion designers Viktor Horsting and Rolf Snoeren-working together as Viktor&Rolf-have gained critical acclaim for their cerebral, witty and rebellious approach to design, their technical virtuosity and deep knowledge of fashion history. Their spectacular avant-garde creations are showcased for the first time in this richly illustrated publication. Throughout their illustrious 25-year career, Viktor&Rolf have carved a contradictory identity that pushes the boundaries between art and fashion, often contrasting romance and violence, exuberance and control, classicism and rebellion. Exploring their concept of "wearable art," Viktor&Rolf: Fashion Artists features some of the Dutch design duo's most show-stopping and innovative works, drawn from the Viktor&Rolf archive as well as museum collections in the Netherlands. It includes an exclusive recent interview with the designers, a fascinating glossary of Viktor & Rolf and an essay by the Geneva-based academic Luca Marchetti, whose analysis reveals Viktor & Rolf's complex relationship with haute couture and its history

Abstract
Straddling the boundaries between art and fashion, a group of young avant guard Australian fashion designers burst onto the scene in the 1970s – 1980s with a blur and blaze of spectacular colours, reflecting the spirit and vibrancy of Australia. Their dazzling brightly coloured one-of-a-kind art clothes captured Australia's exuberance, its vitality and its pioneering spirit; a larrikin kind of quality that is so often inherent in the Australian character. The notion of fashion as art can be attributed to this group of visionaries who explored the broader aesthetics and expressive qualities associated with the visual arts and created a new language of fashion. Rather than following fashion trends, they consciously rejected mainstream norms, and created distinctive Australian art clothes and raised craft to the status of the fine arts. The paper examines the creative work of Australian designers Jenny Kee, Linda Jackson, Katie Pye and Jenny Bannister who created a unique vision of Australian dress that become part of Australian fashion history.

In the last decade, a new generation of designers in Africa and the wider diaspora has started to rise through the fashion industry's ranks. These talents are riding the wider wave of global interest in Africa's cultural, economic, and technological ascension and are also taking advantage of improved infrastructure, education, and governance. According to the World Bank, Africa now boasts seven of the ten fastest growing economies. In addition, over 300 million Africans can currently be considered as middle class, while the number of high-net-worth individuals continues to grow. International investment is flooding into the continent, and the manufacturing, financial, corporate, technology, and telecommunications sectors are booming. This has a trickle-down effect not just upon fashion but all of the creative industries. Music, literature, film, and art are all gaining traction. Added to this is the fact that an estimated seventy percent of Africa's population is under the age of thirty. It is this new generation of upwardly mobile designers who, possessed with a global vision, are beginning to shine so brightly. Whereas fashion was not traditionally seen as a viable occupation within Africa, today's designers are making desirable, well-made, well-marketed collections that hang from rails all over the world.

In this moment of ecological crisis, the consequences of crisis are unevenly distributed, with those with the least power impacted the most. The fashion industry's growth, spurred in the past decades by fast fashion and a reliance on growth of petroleum-based fibers, is a con- tributor to this uneven distribution of ecological consequences. This paper explores fashion and ecology as interconnected transnational sys- tems. It does this with reference to two contexts: the UK and the Gulf state of Bahrain. By exploring positions on environmentalism in the UK and Bahrain, questions around fibers, clothing care and waste, this paper underscores the political urgency and the relational effects of change that span nation states within the fashion sector. Decarbonizing the fashion system requires both localized action and methodologies in addition to political will to work between and across such themes. Transnational perspectives are central to cumulative whole-systems effects.