Fashion Studies advocates and offers a platform for research that is both critical of fashion studies and recognizes fashion’s nuanced history and continued potential as a tool for systemic change.

Fashion Studies Special Issues Proposal Guide

Here at Fashion Studies, we are always looking for new and innovative ways to look at fashion scholarship and research. While we love publishing our annual Volume and biannual Issues, we also love collaborating with talented academics from around the world to create Special Issues that are meaningful and push the envelope for the field of fashion studies. Fashion Studies advocates and offers a platform for research that is both critical of fashion studies and recognizes fashion’s nuanced history and continued potential as a tool for systemic change. Creating Special Issues that centre on topics that mean the most to our contributors and readers is a priority. We are excited to hear what you have in mind.

To propose a Special Issue, we ask that you submit a 500-word proposal to the Fashion Studies email address, fashionstudies@ryerson.ca (fashion studies [at] ryerson [dot] ca). Your proposal should include a strong focus as well as a description of why your topic is important to the field of fashion scholarship. Should you have any submissions you would like to see published in your Special Issue, please include the title of the work along with one to two sentences summarizing each piece. Please note that at Fashion Studies we accept a wide range of scholarly work, both in the form of traditional papers or creative, mixed-media formats. The work will still need to be formally submitted in order to be considered for inclusion, but it will be helpful for us to understand the types of research you envision being part of the special issue.

Please include the following along with your proposals

Five key words
A 100- to 150-word bio for any proposed Guest Editors of the Special Issue
A Works Cited list and appropriate in-text citations
The secured rights for any images/figures/graphs included

Finally, we ask that you follow the general formatting guidelines listed in our checklist (read it h ere). Should your proposal be accepted, you will create a 250- to 300-word Call for Submissions. The peer review and publication process will follow the same guidelines as our annual Volume, with the Guest Editor(s) standing in for most of the Co-Editors’ roles.

Thank you again for your interest in creating a special issue for Fashion Studies. We look forward to reading your proposal! For some inspiration and to see what Special Issues we’re currently working on, please continue reading below.

Special Issue, Fashioning Resurgence

Issue editors: Riley Kucheran, Toronto Metropolitan University; Ben Barry, Parsons School of Design. Editorial Assistants: Sarah Tamashiro, Sainsbury Research Unit; Shawkay Ottmann, Independent Scholar.

After an incredible panel series, several runway showcases, a sold-out marketplace, and some time for reflection, the Fashioning Resurgence Symposium is excited to share with you the next steps for Fashioning Resurgence.

The panels which took place during Indigenous Fashion Week Toronto as part of the Fashioning Resurgence Symposium will be transcribed and made available to panelists for editing, before being published in this special issue of Fashion Studies. We have closed our Call for Submissions for the Special Issue.

Fashion Studies: The State of the Field

Issue editors: Sarah Scaturro, The Cleveland Museum of Art, and Ann Marguerite Tartsinis, Stanford University

This special issue of Fashion Studies explores the questions: where does fashion studies begin and end? Is fashion studies research permitted to travel across or exist between disciplinary borders? Might we frame fashion studies as fundamentally interdisciplinary, multi-disciplinary, and/or cross-disciplinary?

In the past two decades, approaches using fashion as a lens to engage and explore our material and visual world have exploded, uniting scholars from disparate academic disciplines—from art and design history to anthropology, sociology, and performance studies—under what we now call “fashion studies.” And, across these fields, fashion deeply resonates as a scholarly subject for those concerned with debates on gender, modernity, and globalization as well as other sites of critical inquiry. Yet, we come to the crucial set of questions above as there remains much anxiety around policing the boundaries of this scholarly discourse, leading to questions of accessibility, legitimacy and membership. Who is allowed to do this? What are the requisite credentials and how do we earn and teach them? What is the state of this perpetually shifting field and how might we advance the understanding of fashion studies as a central node in a dynamic constellation of research areas across the humanities and sciences?

The contributions to this issue address these questions by exploring each authors’ own unique positionality on one hand and marshalling a wide array of scholarly and popular discourses on the other. These contributors are intentionally selected to represent authors and approaches from around the world, especially beyond the West. Engaging the flexibility of Fashion Studies’s digital platform, this issue combines long-form essays with conversations, artistic statements, and visual portfolios. Our ultimate goal is to signal that fashion studies is an expansive and permeable field that can absorb and support many types of perspectives.