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.

The primary objective of this creative project was to develop an imagery source through the observation and analysis of historical and contemporary clothing. The secondary objective was to produce both jewelry and functional objects in metal that reflected the author's personal interpretation of such garment forms. This body of work employed a variety of traditional metalsmithing techniques. / Department of Art

The current fashion textiles industry is based on an outdated, exploitative system that encourages fast consumption, generates huge amounts of textile waste, creates toxic impacts to ecosystems and causes significant social impacts to production workers. The move towards a more sustainable industry is a complex challenge and will be based on circular and social systems that prioritise values, collaboration and empathy for the environment and all stakeholders. This research defines the move towards a more sustainable fashion textiles industry as a transition that operates across environmental, social, and human domains. At the human level, the transition is an emergent process that involves both ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ dimensions (Maiteny & Reed 1988). For fashion textile designers, this process will demand new ways to practice and engage with the sustainability agenda, including the ‘outer’ dimensions of better materials or more ethical production models; and the ‘inner’, reflective dimensions of values and the self. This research proposes new roles for designers in these transitionary contexts, through craft-based fashion textile design practice. The practice projects presented in the thesis demonstrate three new roles that evolve through the sustainable design continuum to the highest level of Design for Social Equity (Manzini & Vezzoli 2008), where designers will support all stakeholders towards systemic, sustainable change. The practice projects reveal a collaborative and inter-disciplinary approach to fashion textile design practice in industry, local communities and the global supply chain. The research draws on a range of literature from sustainability theory, design/craft thinking, and psychology. The mixed methodology includes an action–research phase of collaborative practice projects, facilitation of workshops with designers in industry, and a reflective phase of textile making and writing. A model for the Transitionary Textile Designer is presented as a final outcome. In order for fashion textile designers to practice in transitionary contexts ‘beyond the swatch’, the research presents new methods and tools to connect individual values to social values inherent in the transition towards sustainability.

This practice-led study contributes new methods of practice and applications of theory to record and analyse the costumed body in performance. While costume scholarship has gained momentum in recent years, this is the first research project to fully explore the application of drawing blind as a means of documenting a researcher’s response to the costumed body. This study contributes to existing knowledge of drawing practice as a method of costume research,through its development of a specific methodology of blind drawing used to record observations while watching video, rehearsals and performance. It also extends the theorisation of costume, through its application of texts by Charles Sanders Peirce on semiosis, interpretation and habits, and contributes new insight into costume design practice by enabling the first costume-focussed analysis of works by 'Tanztheater Wuppertal' in the English language. The first part of the thesis discusses three cycles of drawing, interpretation and costume design. The starting points for these investigations are my experiences watching dancers perform in the German dance theatre company 'Tanztheater Wuppertal'. These experiences were enriched by my being granted access to rehearsals and performances,which facilitated unique opportunities to observe dancers in and out of costume. Blind drawing was used to look more attentively at costumes and to record my observations of these dancers. The complexities of using blind drawing and annotation, as methods to articulate this visual, auditory and spatial information, were tested through drawing practice and analysed using a theoretical framework incorporating Peircean theory,costume studies and scenography. Questions and uncertainties that arose through this process were then explored through experimental costume practice, in which costumes were designed and tested on volunteer performers. The second stage of the research describes and analyses my costume design for three experimental performances shown in public spaces that were informed by these cycles of practice and theory.

Designers have recently become increasingly involved with small-scale producer communities around the world, mostly in the southern hemisphere, and this increase has highlighted the significance of these encounters in the creation of economic and social opportunities for those peoples. This study identifies that, however, these encounters present challenges and imply ethical responsibilities that current design methodologies fail to embrace in their long-term goals. This research investigates the interaction between designers visiting local producers whose livelihood is deeply dependent not just on the natural environment and their local culture but also on the process of fabrication. This thesis proposes a new methodology to guide designers and producers through a reflective process of social change in producer communities. This methodology derives from a combination of activity theory and the capability approach to wellbeing applied within design and producer community practices. The aim is to support a dialogical and holistic design approach to this kind of cooperation, as well as to endorse research and professional practice in the field of design for social change. This research seeks to break new ground by generating perspectives that support both designers and local producers in tackling and resolving issues of individual and collective wellbeing. The research draws on interviews with designers working with local producers in different countries. In addition, the author presents her own experiences of researching and working with Amazon rainforest rubber-tapping communities which have adopted new production methods in order to acquire new capabilities and help conserve their environment. Two case studies illustrate the reflective methodology applied to the designer and producer interactions within social innovation and entrepreneurship. But it is fundamentally the materiality of the rubber, and the revelation of the interdependences within and without the locality, that form the framework of this thesis.

‘Sexuality, Identity and the Clothed Male Body’ is a PhD by Published Work that draws together a collective body of work that deals specifically and significantly with the dressed male body. This thesis presents a case for the collection of publications included in the submission to be viewed as a coherent body of work which makes a contribution to knowledge in the fields of fashion studies and cultural studies, in which the works are situated. The body of work consists of two monographs - Don We Now Our Gay Apparel: Gay Men’s Dress in the Twentieth Century (Berg, 2000), and The Story of Men’s Underwear (Parkstone International Press, 2010) - and two chapters in edited books - ‘Butch Queens in Macho Drag: Gay Men, Dress and Subcultural Identity’ (2008) and ‘Hair and Male (Homo)Sexuality: Up-Top and Down Below’ (2008). Through an examination of the major themes addressed throughout the submitted body of work – sexuality, identity, subcultural formation, men’s dress and masculinities and clothes and the body - this thesis demonstrates that the published work contributes to knowledge through its two major foci. Firstly, the means by which gay men have utilised their dressed bodies as a situated and embodying practice to articulate identity, masculinity, and social and sexual interaction, and secondly an examination of men’s underwear’s specific function in the covering, exposing and representation of men’s bodies. These were, until recently, relatively neglected areas of fashion studies and dress history, and by explicitly bringing together these areas to present a comprehensive investigation this thesis serves to provide a new contribution to knowledge in these areas. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, that is common in both fashion studies and cultural studies, the specific combination of research methods that is employed throughout the body of work, has provided a unifying element that further enhances this contribution to knowledge.

This thesis focuses on the relationship between the socialist system and fashion in four countries: Croatia, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and the Soviet Union during seventy-two years of communist rule. From its beginning in 1917, the socialist system had an antagonistic relationship with fashion, which eventually turned into a grudging acceptance by the end of the 1980s. I identify two main types of sartorial official codes within socialism: utopian dress and socialist official fashion. I analyse these ideological constructs through the concepts of time, class, taste and gender. The symbolic production of utopian dress was informed by the initial Bolshevik rejection of the past and the search for a totally new type of clothes. Socialist official fashion reflected the regimes' ontological fear of change and discontinuity, and in the later phases of socialism their need to dress up their new middle classes in civilian clothes. The socialist regimes failed to invent a new socialist dress. Instead, they embraced the most traditional aesthetics in dress and the most conventional notion of gender. I demonstrate that similarities and differences in socialist official fashion were informed by ideological shifts within the master narratives in the respective countries. I conclude that the problematic relationship between socialism and fashion was caused by their ontological differences.

This thesis presents a historicized account of the construction of identity within contemporary indie. Indie emerged as a music scene in the early 1980s, and existing scholarly accounts of it focus on practices of music production and consumption. Indie has expanded and diversified over the last 30 years, however. Crucially, in the UK it has become increasingly interconnected into popular fashion – a development that has transformed indie from being a space solely for the construction of masculine identities, as it was in the 1980s, into a space for the construction of both masculine and feminine identities. These transformations within indie have not been addressed, and one of the contributions of this research is to fill this gap. This thesis contributes to the field of youth cultural studies by providing new knowledge on the relationship between youth culture and popular fashion. Drawing on the Bourdieuian concept ‘field’, the thesis explores the relationship between the sub-field of indie music and the field of popular fashion in the UK, arguing that contemporary indie forms at the points of overlap between these two fields: where their value systems are mutually informative and where their value systems diverge. Drawing on Foucault’s concepts ‘discourse’ and ‘practices of the self’, this thesis explores the way in which this complex popular cultural formation creates a space for the construction of identities. Through an analysis of media representations, it considers the discursive constitution of indie, and through an analysis of participant observation and interviews, it explores the ways in which those people participating in this formation construct the self. The thesis contributes to the field of fashion studies in that it draws together these two methodologies into an examination of the construction of identity and, more specifically, gendered identities.

My intention is to contribute to the field of exhibition-making a repertoire of presentation modes, previously not analysed or documented, that can be applied to the display of fashion in the museum and which will extend those techniques currently available to the exhibition-maker to create meaningful and stimulating exhibition environments. Part 1 contextualises my investigation, through discussion of the exhibition as source material, the methods employed to execute the research and analysis of relevant literature. Part 1 concludes with an introduction to ModeMuseum, Antwerp, which is the primary location for my research. Part 2 details the identification, description and definition of a repertoire of presentation modes, classified and distinguished as innovative through comparative analysis of over 100 exhibitions visited for this research, alongside investigation of the exhibition formats and structures that support deployment of the modes. Part 3 relates the application of the presentation modes to the construction of a 'fashion autobiography‘ in the form of a proposal for a hypothetical exhibition, through examination of the processes utilised to develop the exhibition narrative and detailed account of the proposal in its final realisation. In conclusion, I will critically reflect on the research executed, underlining the interrelationship of the theoretical and practice-based activities. Finally, I will detail opportunities taken to disseminate this research, and indicate possible directions for continued investigation.

This doctoral enquiry develops practice-orientated approaches to design for sustainability. It focuses on the relationship between garment design, laundry practices and sustainability, and responds to research that evidences domestic laundering as one of the most environmentally damaging stages in a garment’s lifecycle (Allwood, et al.,2006; Hansen, et al., 2007). A one-year laundry study surveyed the use and laundry of sixteen garments to ascertain the relationship between garment design and laundry behaviour. The research findings revealed that laundry behaviours are complex and unpredictable, and often not directly linked to producing cleaner clothes. Laundry routines are underpinned by factors beyond cleanliness including: garment use, social auditing, garment aesthetics,life stage, cultural norms, and spatial arrangements within the household. Through re-examining laundry as a social practice the research develops a series of design provocations to challenge the organisation of laundry practices, and by extension the frequencies and processes in which laundry is carried out. The findings highlight that understanding laundry as a social practice opens a space to reconceptualise design, laundry behaviour and sustainability. It decentres material products and attends to the embedded social dynamics that are set within a nexus of spaces, materials, thoughts, actions and emotions. This provides an alternative lens from which to view and develop design theories and practice for sustainability in fashion. The central insight from the research shows there are multiple benefits from incorporating social theory into methodologies for design for sustainability.