Critical literature on surfing is concerned primarily with its development as a competitive sport, focusing on ‘stand-up’ surfing in the USA and to some extent in Australia, resulting in a body of work populated almost exclusively by young white males. However, in Cornwall, forms of surfing including belly and body boarding have been enjoyed for almost a century by all ages and ethnicities, both sexes, at every level from international competition to non-competitive leisure, from daily practice to holiday novelty. The area has developed a distinctive clothing culture stemming from this plethora of surfing activities. This study asks, how has the material culture of bellyboarding and surfing in Cornwall developed historically, and how does the clothing culture in the area relate to the global phenomenon of surf style? The contemporary scene is evaluated by means of a visual ethnography of a Cornish seaside village where surfing is the focus of social events and commercial endeavours. Through an examination of the clothing culture in the area, it explores how gender and sexuality, class and consumption, community and belonging are negotiated and articulated. The historical and cultural contexts in which this complex relationship developed are discussed with reference to archival material from regional museums, personal collections and interviews with amateur and professional surf historians. Oral histories of surfing, bellyboarding, bodyboarding and beach life compiled for the study and from existing collections are additionally used to interrogate existing narratives of surfing history. Drawing on and extending theoretical perspectives on subculture, taste, consumption, space and place, this will be the first study that investigates how the clothing culture of surfing explores and constitutes, constructs and reconstructs gender, class and regional identity, and how it defines and redefines the region’s surfing locales by its visible presence.

Multisensory perception is fundamental to the wearer’s experience of everyday dress, yet this remains an under-researched area within fashion and dress studies. Dress is predominantly described in visual terms, while much less attention has been paid to other relevant sensory aspects such as; touch, sound,smell - and to a lesser degree taste - and to the ways in which these interact. Similarly, within the now established field of sensory scholarship, little attention has been paid to the topic of dress. One of the contributions of this thesis is to address the above gaps in relation to both male and female contemporary UK dress(and more generally, dress within a Western context). It also attends to the wider academic neglect of male dressed experience. This thesis draws upon sensory scholarship to bring a fresh perspective to current embodied understandings of everyday dress, thereby contributing to the field of dress studies by explicitly focussing on the sensory nature of dress. This research aims to foster an inter-disciplinary research field of ‘fashion, dress and the senses’. A new body of data, based on individual testimony around sensory experience of dress, has been collected using life-world interviews with twenty participants, both men and women, incorporating material culture analysis. Contextualised within the specific social and cultural lives of the participants, the analysis of this data is distinctive in that it weaves together material, cultural,social, phenomenological and sensory perspectives. The analysis explores how sensory engagement with dress affected both the materiality of the dress items and the participants by triggering behaviour,thoughts, memories and emotions. Felt on the boundaries of the body, dress is positioned as providing a sensory atmosphere for the wearer, one that negotiates the tensions between private and public experience, enabling the participants to push out into and pull back from the world. It is therefore argued that sensory engagement with dress is an integral part of the wearer’s everyday negotiation of the self within social life.

This thesis surveys various types of jewellery that reference death which emerged between 1980-2008. It compares them to their historical precedents, particularly mourning and memento mori jewellery, which had fallen out of use by the early twentieth century. The return of this imagery in late twentieth century jewellery might suggest a revival of older, obsolete rituals of death and mourning, and imply changes in popular attitudes towards bereavement and grief, even a new cultural acceptance of death and mortality. However, the contemporary meanings of the new jewellery appeared to be more varied, wide-ranging and ambiguous than those of their historical precedents. The thesis examines some of the changed meanings and altered contexts for the new mourning and memento mori jewellery, by surveying a broad range of jewellery that is normally studied separately within different academic disciplines. It is sourced from the funeral industry, subculture, studio jewellery, pop memorabilia, mass market and avant-garde fashion. In addition, the thesis examines the narratives and meanings that jewellery is imbued with by individuals following bereavement or illness. It addresses questions of how, or whether, items of jewellery differ from other forms of material and visual culture because they are worn objects. Throughout the thesis, jewellery is the key focus and it is analysed using methods from material culture studies, design history and sociology. Together, the breadth of sources and interdisciplinary approach demonstrate that jewellery worn to signify death, memory and mourning is part of a continuum of the wider symbolic and sentimental value of jewellery. The thesis shows a new separation between the functions of mourning and memento mori in jewellery; the absence of an unambiguous, recognisable visual language of death; and a greater, but more private, degree of individualisation of grief in contemporary mourning jewellery than that found in earlier periods.

Since the Industrial Revolution, fashion and technology have been linked through the textile and manufacturing industries, a relationship that has propelled technical innovation and aesthetic and social change. Today a new alliance is emerging through the integration of electronic technology and smart materials on the body. However, it is not fashion designers who are exploiting this emerging area but interaction design, performance art and electronic and computing technologists. 'The Emotional Wardrobe' is a practice-based research project that seeks to address this imbalance by integrating technology with clothing from a fashion perspective. It aims to enhance fashion's expressive and responsive potential by investigating clothing that can both represent and stimulate an emotional response through the interface of technology. Precedents can be found in the work of other practitioners who merge clothing design with responsive material technology to explore social interaction, social commentary and body responsive technology. Influence is also sought from designers who investigate the notion of paradoxical emotions. A survey of emotion science, emotional design, and affective computing is mapped onto a fashion design structure to assess if this fusion can create new 'poetic' paradigms for the interaction of fashion and technology. These models are explored through the production of 'worn' and 'unworn' case studies which are visualised through responsive garment prototypes and multimedia representations. The marriage of fashion and technology is tested through a series of material experiments that aim to create a new aesthetic vocabulary that is responsive and emotional. They integrate traditional fashion fabrics with material technology to enhance the definition of fashion. The study shows that the merger of fashion and technology can offer a more personal and provocative definition of self, one which actively involves the wearer in a mutable aesthetic identity, replacing the fixed physicality of fashion with a constant flux of self-expression and playful psychological experience. The contribution of the research consists of: the integration of technology to alter communication in fashion, a recontextualisation of fashion within a wider arena of emotion and technology, the use of technologies from other disciplines to materialize ideas and broaden the application of those technologies, and the articulation of a fashion design methodology.

This thesis explores the role of First World War British army clothing to the representation and experience of men through popular culture, official regulations and personal accounts. The aims of the research are threefold. Firstly, it examines how mass mobilisation altered sources and systems of army clothing supply to consider how large-scale production and consumption shaped masculine identities. Secondly, the thesis argues that khaki service dress was part of the iconography of war, a visible signifier of active military participation and object of evocation and memory. Finally, it explores tensions between individual experience and collective myth to consider the role of clothing practices to the formation of ideas about gender, class and the relationship between the body and technology during the First World War. The discussion explores themes of gender and visuality through a focused analysis of the ways in which British army uniform was worn, promoted and made between 1914-1918. It shows how the specific design of khaki service dress drew attention to the body, created illusions of corporeal durability and suggested equality through an aesthetic of standardisation. The work of Michel Foucault is used to consider how cultural practices shape objects, specifically in relation to disciplinary techniques and gendered practices in military culture. The thesis shows how the service dress enabled techniques for body discipline and standardisation, but also how its role in military discourses perpetuated the fiction of a singular and uniform masculinity. Thus, the research explores the formation of meaning of army clothing in wartime through popular representations, but tests their reliability against a range of other kinds of sources such as personal accounts, production processes, trade organisation and official regulations. As clothing links a number of related concerns, the thesis uses uniform to establish a dialogue between formerly discrete disciplines, in particular, military history, social history and cultural studies. This exploration of the significance of military uniform, an object experienced by a wide range of social groups, contributes to current debates about British popular culture during the First World War.

This thesis has several strands relating to the future prospects of the Thai fashion industry, which has undergone recent instability in the context of the global fashion system. They presuppose a reorientation and/or development of the domestic economy and culture of consumption of Thailand to favour innovation, originality and personal identity. The thesis will present an argument based upon the creation of conceptual models derived in part from existing models and theories, from literature surveys and empirical studies. A new framework to conceptualise the fashion process in Thailand called, the Thai Fashion Process Model is presented. Through the process of the comparative studies, the fashion process in the West is set against that which exists in Thailand. The Western fashion process model integrates much previous research about the fashion process, fills important gaps that the symbolic interactionist theory of fashion omits, and makes a number of new predictions about the translation of social trends into specific lifestyles and individual differences within the commodification process. The model purposes two important fashion forces: the differentiating force and the socialising force. These operate at different levels (macro and micro) and through different fashion practitioners. The empirical studies gathered data tor analysis through interview and questionnaire surveys at the micro-level in both the UK and Thailand within the context of the conceptual framework. Additional data tor analysis was also gathered relative to the macro-level. The studies provide excellent support for the reconceptualisation and, in particular, suggest that individual psychological factors might be given a new prominence in the overall fashion process and the way in which new fashions emerge. The new Thai Fashion Process Model presents a different direction in the fashion change sequence, which implies a reorientation of the industry towards a high priority in domestic fashion origination and innovation. The socio-cultural economic changes require a refocusing towards individual or segmented consumers' motivation, needs, and desires as opposed to the conformity that exists in contemporary Thai society in its domestic consumption.

This practice-led PhD proposes alternative practices in a research and design context that explore the intersection of fashion, fine art and performance methodology and practice. The project exposes and documents the emergence and development of conceptual and experimental fashion and interdisciplinary practice at the edges of the fashion discipline. The research provides new insights into the way fashion designers can work conceptually and how their work might be perceived differently, dependent on contexts of presentation. It investigates how the concept behind the design and the context of presentation affect these readings for both the viewer and the wearer. It uncovers the emotional and experiential factors of fashion and exposes how we experience and respond to clothing/fashion in a variety of contexts. The thesis draws attention to the lack of specific identification given to conceptual thinking in fashion design as an outcome within its own right and proposes new applications and approaches to this practice. The research methodology developed within the practice extends the potential of communicating body related concepts to wearers and viewers through the medium of clothing worn on the body and can be applied in part or whole across a range disciplines. The thesis synthesises a body of knowledge to inform practitioners of conceptual fashion and reveals the complexity of communication between designer, wearer and viewer of conceptual fashion in specific contexts. The researcher has designed collections of concept-based work, which are not driven by market constraints, trends and seasons but by concepts and processes. These collections have been tested and analysed in a variety of contexts and written up as three major case studies. The process of design developed within this research focuses on the body, movement and behaviour; through experimentation and testing it reaffirms the emphasis on the creative process allowing for consideration of context as fundamental to the communication of embodied concepts. It is argued that it is necessary for fashion designers to review the way in which they design for specific contexts such as dance, exhibition and areas of fashion promotion and communication. This requires a different approach that pays attention to both concept and context at the point of inception.

Colour forecasting is a sector of trend forecasting which is arguably the most important link in the product development process, yet little is known about it, the methodology behind its development or its accuracy. It is part of a global trend forecasting industry valued recently at $36bn, providing information which is developed commercially eighteen months to two years ahead of the season. Used throughout the garment supply chain, by the yarn and fibre manufacturers, the fabric mills, garment designers and retailers, it plays a pivotal role in the fashion and textile industry, but appears in many different forms. Colour forecasts were first commercially produced in 1917, but became more widely used during the 1970s, and in recent years digital versions of colour forecasts have become increasingly popular. The investigation aimed to establish the historical background of the industry, mindful of the considerable changes to fashion manufacturing and retailing in recent decades. For the purposes of the investigation, a period spanning 25 years was selected, from 1985 to 2010. In reviewing the available literature, and the methodologies currently used in developing forecasting information, it became clear that there was a view that the process is very intuitive, and thus a lack of in depth academic literature. This necessitated a considerable quantity of primary research in order to fill the gaps in the knowledge regarding the development, use and accuracy of colour forecasting. A mixed method approach to primary research was required to answer the aim of the thesis, namely to investigate how colour forecasts are compiled, and examine their use, influence and accuracy within the fashion and textiles industry, suggesting methods for developing more accurate forecasts in the future. Interviews were conducted with industry practitioners comprising forecasters, designers and retailers to better understand how colour was developed and used within industry. Two longitudinal studies were carried out with the two largest UK clothing retailers to map their development and use of colour palettes, and understand better how colour contributes to the critical path and supply chain. Two colour development meetings were observed, one with a commercial colour forecaster, the other with an industry association, and two colour archives were studied to establish whether or not any identifiable and predictable colour cycles existed. Data from the interviews and longitudinal studies were analysed using a grounded approach, and revealed some new insights into the influences upon the development of colour forecasts both commercially and from the retailer's perspective. The sell through rates of merchandise, EPOS analysis and range of practices between those interviewed and the two retailers studied provided an interesting insight into working practices and how colour forecasting information is changed when used by the retailers. It was found that a group of core colours existed, which were used season after season, and consistently demonstrated a high sell through rate, such as black, white, grey and navy. In order to establish whether or not colour cycles were consistently predictable in their repetition, two colour forecasting archives were assessed. If predictable colour cycles existed, they would be a useful tool in developing more accurate forecasts. Unfortunately this was not the case, as no clear colour cycles were found. However, the archive, together with evidence from the retailers demonstrated the 'lifecycle' of fashion colours was longer than expected, as they took time to phase in and out. It was concluded that in general the less fashion led brands used their own signature colours and were able to develop colour palettes far later in the product development timeline. This approach could be adopted more widely by retailers and designers as it was discovered that although accuracy rates for colour forecasts are generally accepted to be around 80%, the commercial forecasters provide colour update cards closer to the season where at least 40% of the colours are changed. Very early information, two years ahead of the season is no longer necessary in the contemporary fashion and textiles industry.

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This thesis examines contemporary niche fashion magazines and uses as a case study an ethnographic investigation of a niche fashion magazine and its producers and readers. Fashion magazines are instrumental not only in helping readers make sense of, understand and consume fashion; they are themselves fashionable media that set trends in how fashion is mediated. Niche fashion magazines are a sub genre of fashion magazines that is produced and consumed by cultural intermediaries. They are part of a complex cultural circuit which involves their marketing, production, circulation, textual representations and readers' consumption. Within this circuit values, meanings, codes, notions and practices of fashion are exchanged, and these are the focus of this thesis. This thesis examines the niche fashion magazine genre, addressing its hybridised quality of art, popular culture, high fashion, elite and edge. Through active participant observation, the case study explores the production practices and the different economies and values that inform the encoding of fashion into the magazine. Drawing on in-depth interviews with niche fashion magazine readers, the thesis also explores how readers make sense of niche fashion magazines by engaging with their symbolic value. Within the fashion press niche fashion magazines are the focal media for the tastemakers of fashion. Yet niche fashion magazines as an object of inquiry has been neglected by academia, which has paid more attention to women's and men's magazines and their textual representations. A central aim of this thesis is to contribute to an understanding of the meanings of fashion mediation with a specific focus on the methodological integration of textual, consumption and production analysis. By generating new insight as to how fashion is exchanged and mediated between producers and readers of niche fashion magazines it contributes to the study of fashion within sociology and media research.