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This article deals with art, fashion design, and cultural practice as both critique and creativity. It analyses artworks by William Kentridge, Sue Austin, and Lina Iris Viktor, as well as the fashion of Viktor & Rolf, reading these different works as modes of resistance and revolt against current forms and relations of power and knowledge. The authors place emphasis on new materialism and posthuman theory as theoretical frameworks that expand the range of cultural critique. They add a thematic focus on the actual bodies, the materials of cultural action, and the role of non-human elements in the making of artworks. With reference to feminist, decolonial and indigenous theories, the article analyses the workings of counter-cultural memories in contemporary art and fashion design practices.

Learning how to think through fashion is both exciting and challenging, being dependent on one's ability to critically engage with an array of theories and concepts. This is the first book designed to accompany readers through the process of thinking through fashion. It aims to help them grasp both the relevance of social and cultural theory to fashion, dress, and material culture and, conversely, the relevance of those fields to social and cultural theory. It does so by offering a guide through the work of selected major thinkers, introducing their concepts and ideas. Each chapter is written by an expert contributor and is devoted to a key thinker, capturing the significance of their thought to the understanding of the field of fashion, while also assessing the importance of this field for a critical engagement with these thinkers' ideas.This is a guide and reference for students and scholars in the fields of fashion, dress and material culture, the creative industries, sociology, cultural history, design and cultural studies.--Publisher website

Memory matters. It matters because memory brings the past into the present, and opens it up to the future. But it also matters literally, because memory is mediated materially. Materiality is the stuff of memory. Meaningful objects that we love (or hate) function not only as aide-mémoire but are integral to memory. Drawing on previous scholarship on the interrelation of memory and materiality, this book applies recent theories of new materialism to explore the material dimension of memory in art and popular culture. The book's underlying premise is twofold: on the one hand, memory is performed, mediated, and stored through the material world that surrounds us; on the other hand, inanimate objects and things also have agency on their own, which affects practices of memory, as well as forgetting. Chapter 1 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 3.0 license. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/tandfbis/rt-files/docs/Open+Access+Chapters/9781138203235_oachapter1.pdf Chapter 4 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 3.0 license. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/tandfbis/rt-files/docs/Open+Access+Chapters/9781138203235_oachapter4.pdf Chapter 5 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 3.0 license. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/tandfbis/rt-files/docs/Open+Access+Chapters/9781138203235_oachapter5.pdf

This article analyses the complex relationship between the construction of gender identities among young Chinese females and the practice of dressing up in Hanfu attire. The study employs the perspectives of dress as a situated embodied practice, the performativity of gender and the catwalk as a form of performance art. By drawing on an ethnography of self-defined Hanfu fans in Beijing, China, the authors investigate how the female participants construct femininities through performing on Hanfu catwalks. The ethnographic findings are that, first, the Hanfu catwalk mediates the intricate interplay of Chinese aesthetic norms and gender expression between performers and the audience. Second, wearing Hanfu is an embodied practice unifying the Hanfu costume style, gender construction and corporeal acts, situated in China's sociopolitical context. Third, Chinese femininity is complex, with both flexibility and internal conflicts, reflecting China's paradoxical modernization.

Memory matters. It matters because memory brings the past into the present, and opens it up to the future. But it also matters literally, because memory is mediated materially. Materiality is the stuff of memory. Meaningful objects that we love (or hate) function not only as aide-mémoire but are integral to memory. Drawing on previous scholarship on the interrelation of memory and materiality, this book applies recent theories of new materialism to explore the material dimension of memory in art and popular culture. The book's underlying premise is twofold: on the one hand, memory is performed, mediated, and stored through the material world that surrounds us; on the other hand, inanimate objects and things also have agency on their own, which affects practices of memory, as well as forgetting. Chapter 1 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 3.0 license. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/tandfbis/rt-files/docs/Open+Access+Chapters/9781138203235_oachapter1.pdf Chapter 4 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 3.0 license. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/tandfbis/rt-files/docs/Open+Access+Chapters/9781138203235_oachapter4.pdf Chapter 5 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 3.0 license. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/tandfbis/rt-files/docs/Open+Access+Chapters/9781138203235_oachapter5.pdf