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.

Heike Jenss is Associate Professor of Fashion Studies at Parsons School of Design, The New School, New York, USA.
Viola Hofmann was, until her untimely death in 2023, a full-time faculty member at the Institute of Arts and Material Culture at TU Dortmund University, Germany.

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
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
Notes on Contributors
Index