Fashion Practice

The Journal of Design, Creative Process & the Fashion Industry

ISSN: 1756-9370 (Print) 1756-9389 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rffp20

Ten Years of Fashion Practice

Marilyn Delong & Sandy Black

To cite this article: Marilyn Delong & Sandy Black (2018) Ten Years of Fashion�Practice, Fashion
Practice, 10:3, 257-261, DOI: 10.1080/17569370.2018.1509484

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/17569370.2018.1509484

Published online: 29 Oct 2018.

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Fashion Practice, 2018, Volume 10, Issue 3, pp. 257–261
DOI: 10.1080/17569370.2018.1509484
# 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group

Ten Years of
Fashion Practice
This issue marks 10 years of Fashion Practice: The Journal of Design,
Creative Process and the Fashion Industry. Over these 10 years, scholars
and practitioners have reflected on fashion practice within both small-
scale and larger industry and within education. This decade has also
marked a growing acceptance that “business as usual” within the fash-
ion industry is no longer tenable from a sustainability perspective. We
have tried to address the question of how to educate the next generation
of designers and practitioners to facilitate change in the industry from
within—in collaboration with industry—but also to disrupt the status
258 Editorial

quo and lead to systemic change. We have selected manuscripts that

address the practice of fashion and the future needs of the discipline and
the industry. We believe that fashion research has evolved significantly
in the last two decades, evidenced by the expansion in PhD studies and
academic journals related to fashion.
To celebrate this publication milestone, we invited contributors from
the past 10 years of our journal to submit a commentary on their per-
spectives on fashion practice. We are so pleased with the many contribu-
tions that make up our first article in this issue entitled, “Perspectives
on 10 Years of Fashion Practice.” These contributions set the stage for
the remainder of the issue, as some look back on the past decade and
others focus on the future. We invite you to review these diverse contri-
butions. All reflect the need for reconceptualizing fashion and the prac-
tice of fashion, and Fashion Practice will continue to contribute to
this end.
The first three papers are “thought pieces” looking toward new
futures for fashion. First, Simon Thorogood writes about the need for a
new model for creativity in education in his commentary “Shaping
Speculation. Experimental Research Spaces, the Knowledge Economy
and the Role of the New Fashion Augur.” His premise is that we must
find a way to support students to nurture innovation by embracing risk,
ambiguity, inconsistency, and the unfamiliar. Academic institutions need
to champion their role as risky learning places where experimental fash-
ion education is pursued, and students are allowed, even encouraged, to
fail. Students might become new hybrid “fashion augurs” synthesizing
information from many diverse sources, identifying radical opportunities
and also taking a lead in de-stigmatizing such societal notions as disabil-
ity and aging. If the fashion industry is to survive, we need educational
models that prepare us for possible revolution and an uncertain (but
likely digital) fashion future.
Second, Clemens Thornquist, in his paper, “The Fashion Condition:
rethinking fashion principles from its everyday practices,” outlines an
alternative theoretical perspective in the person-object relationship. He
recognizes the prevailing idea of fashion as a system that does not fully
recognize the social practices of the user. He maintains that the user’s
emotional and inconstant state of mind is significant in maintaining sta-
bility in fashion and has potential consequences for thinking about and
developing policy. An ontological shift may be possible with a greater
focus on understanding and managing change and stability in fashion
consumption and developing new perspectives and policies regarding
ethical and ecological issues in the different material cultures related
to fashion.
Third, Otto von Busch, in his commentary, “Inclusive fashion – an
oxymoron – or a possibility for sustainable fashion?” calls for a deeper
investigation of what it means for fashion to be inclusive or exclusive.
He reasons that we need to be asking questions of inclusion: for whom
 Editorial 259

and for what arena? He uses the example of the infamous door codes of
nightclubs to illustrate that the discourse around sustainable fashion
often lacks a socio-political perspective and speculates that making
clothes cheap and accessible does not necessarily mean wider inclusion,
but rather a displacement of the process of rejection. He concludes that
designers must leverage this accessibility and experiment with wider
communicative interfaces and even decouple fashion from consumerism
and materialism: “Designers need to find other ways to use clothing to
address the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion, self-worth and social
status.” The goal for a sustainable fashion practice may well be the eth-
ical distribution of such a social leverage.
The following three papers focus on design practices within fashion
and apparel businesses at both small and larger scale. Research entitled,
“Partnerships in Practice: Producing New Design Knowledge with Users
When Developing Performance Apparel Products” by Kristen Morris
and Susan Ashdown explores design knowledge produced by the user of
performance apparel. Design professionals who work at performance
apparel brands provided detailed accounts describing the context of user
involvement and explored the research methods product developers use
to produce knowledge with users and the links between practices and
knowledge production. They conclude that innovation in performance
apparel products that meet or exceed user expectations can occur with
collaborations that include both socialization and externalization,
emphasizing the importance of users as partners in practice.
Maarit Aakko and Kirsi Niinimaki in “Fashion Designers as
Entrepreneurs: Challenges and Advantages of Micro-size Companies”
write about the challenges designers face who must be simultaneously
designers and entrepreneurs. Interviews with European fashion designers
who were considered entrepreneurial indicated the importance of merg-
ing design with a multi-layered business and managerial acumen. The
freedom offered by establishing an independent fashion business must
be pursued with the attendant realization of uncertainty, but also the
fulfillment of the dream of expressing creativity through one’s
own label.
Jee Hyun Lee, Jiwon Ahn, and Jieun Kim in their paper, “Theoretical
competence model of fashion designers in co-designed fashion systems,”
examine the role and capacity of fashion designers in the co-design pro-
cess. In this qualitative research, the authors conducted in-depth inter-
views with fashion designers working in both general and co-design
contexts to develop a theoretical competence model with specific causal,
contextual and intervening conditions. This outcome is summarized
through a comprehensive analysis of both general and co-design fashion
designer competence models that expand to executional competence
with design leadership and strategic execution.
Practitioner Ania Sadkowska in “Arts-Informed Interpretative
Phenomenological Analysis: ‘Making’ as a means of embodied fashion
260 Editorial

enquiry into older men’s lived experiences” proposes an innovative

research methodology based upon fashion practice. The methodology
highlights the central role of a creative practitioner in developing an in-
depth understanding of how a small sample of mature men experience
fashion and ageing. She focuses on creating a series of three fashion arti-
facts for her participants in response to empirical data gathered via in-
depth interviews and personal inventories that offered a new perspective.
The making processes involved in de-constructing and reconstructing a
series of second-hand suit jackets became an analytical tool to afford
advanced insights into older men’s lived experiences of fashion and
fashionability.
Namkyu Chun and Olga Gurova in their research entitled, “Place-
making the local to reach the global: a case study of Pre-Helsinki” sum-
marize the collective efforts of fashion designers and other local actors
in the internationalization of Finnish fashion. Semi-structured interviews
and ethnographic observations provided the data. Analysis of the
fashion showcase Pre-Helsinki illustrated how local and global discon-
nections were addressed in the activities. The research shows how Pre-
Helsinki appeared as a reaction to local and global level disconnections
in Finnish fashion and how these disconnections were addressed in its
activities and ultimately how they could gain recognition within the
broader development of the Finnish fashion ecosystem.
A book review and two exhibition reviews complete this issue.
Ingeborg Thaanum Carlsen reviews Niche Fashion Magazines. Changing
the Shape of Fashion by Ane Lynge-Jorl
en. Through a detailed study of
Danish fashion magazine DANSK, the phenomenon of niche fashion
magazines is explored, based on research conducted just before the
explosion of social media. Thus, the nature of fashion mediation is
revealed and, with echoes of Otto von Busch’s earlier article in mind,
insight into the world of the fashion insider.
Over the past decade, major fashion exhibitions have been an
increasing success story for museums in many cities including Maison
Margiela “20” The Exhibition in Antwerp (2008), Alexander McQueen
- Savage Beauty in New York (2011) and London (2015), The Future of
Fashion is Now in Rotterdam (2014), Comme des Garçons: The Art of
the In-Between in New York (2017), and Christian Dior Couturier du
R^eve in Paris (2017). Two contrasting fashion exhibitions recently
staged at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London are reviewed here,
both encompassing historical couture and contemporary fashions. Sandy
Black reviews Balenciaga: Shaping Fashion (2017–2018), an exhibition
celebrating this acknowledged master of pattern cutting known as the
“couturier’s couturier” that utilized forensic digital technology to reveal
hidden secrets of construction. Demonstrating the legacy and influence
of Balenciaga on following generations of fashion designers was a major
part of this exhibition. The second V&A Museum exhibition is reviewed
by Katherine Pogson. Fashioned from Nature (2018) covers four
 Editorial 261

hundred years of fashion history from the 17th century, tracing the
often controversial relationship between fashion artifacts and their raw
materials derived from nature. With its crucial agenda to expose the
environmental impacts of fashion, this exhibition also explores many
contemporary responses (both political and environmental) and presents
alternative proposals, engaging the audience in possible future scenarios
for fashion practice.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Marilyn Delong and Sandy Black

s.black@fashion.arts.ac.uk