Thinking through Fashion: A Guide to Key Theorists ed. by Agnès Rocamora and Anneke Smelik (review)

It is noteworthy that the connection between fashion and theory has been downplayed since Roland Barthes’s The Fashion System.¹ Today, fashion as fashion studies includes analyses of the self, the body, designers, models, and the fashion industry, as well how each wearer’s outfits and performance appear in the media. Rosie Findlay coined the ironic term “fashacademic” for scholars within the terrain of fashion’s complicated disciplinary roots: those who study fashion, textiles, design, costume, craft, as well as literature, art, and media/photography/film. They exist together with museum curators, cultural sociologists, queer theorists, anthropologists, and historians.²

The book Thinking through Fashion (subtitled A Guide to the Key Theorists), coedited by Agnès Rocamora (reader in Social and Cultural Studies at the London College of Fashion) and Anneke Smelik (professor of Visual Culture at Radboud University, Nijmegen, Netherlands), takes up the challenge to theorize fashion. They respond to their desire “to make sense of fashion, to unpack, comprehend, and analyse the social and cultural dynamics of fashion, dress, and appearance.”³ Their edited collection reflects the way that contemporary fashion scholars are “hybridized” academics who navigate fashion’s rich theoretical potential. As fashion scholars reread critical theory, they locate how fashion exists within a complex network of ideas that show that fashion is more than mere frippery.

In their introduction, Rocamora and Smelik suggest a working beyond the fashion literary canon, such as Elizabeth Wilson’s much-respected and much-referenced volume, Adorned in Dreams.⁴ They insist that fashion scholars can draw on important critical thought of the past century or more in order to locate a more nuanced and free-flowing interaction between theory and fashion. Part one of the introduction offers logic and justification as to whom the editors see as the key critical thinkers. Rocamora and Smelik navigate the various Euro-American theories of structuralism and semiotics,⁵ then to the “old and new materialisms.” Old materialism applies to material embodiment, while the “new materialism” of Marxism, is “the praxis of production and labour”⁶ connected to the commodity. Theories from cultural anthropology and sociology speak to the “the very being of objects” and, further, the materiality of the human body.⁷ Rocamora and Smelik close this section by insisting that the theoretical work must be done, “in the study of fashion, because, ultimately, fashion is not only fun, but it matters.”⁸ They contend that the world today cannot be understood without completing the task of “thinking through fashion.”

In the second part of the introduction, Rocamora and Smelik provide their précis of the seventeen chapters in the book. These summaries are invaluable; and if one reads nothing more than these, they will have learned a great deal. A single disappointment remains, however: while the inclusions are sufficient, some recent work is neglected, such as Marcel Mauss and military uniforms.⁹ This review summarizes just a few chapters from Thinking through Fashion. The excellent chapters on the popular French poststructural thinkers—Roland Barthes, Giles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Jean Baudrillard, Pierre Bourdieu, Jacques Derrida, and Bruno Latour—are omitted to focus on others perhaps not so familiar.

Anthony Sullivan, of the London College of Fashion, authors Chapter 2, “Karl Marx: Fashion and Capitalism.” Here he fleshes out Elizabeth Wilson’s remark that “fashion is the child of capitalism.”¹⁰ As he explains, one must understand the transition from feudalism to capitalism to evaluate the effects on dress; here the “sartorial class struggle” explains “both fashion’s dynamic of change and [how] the tension between the individual self and the social emerged.”¹¹ This substantial chapter then reveals Marx’s continuing relevance to current scholarship on the ever-increasing commodification of fashion: the sustainability of natural resources together with the continued degradation of human beings in the developing world’s garment industries that...