About

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.