In 2017, fashion theorists Adam Geczy and Vicki Karaminas published their book Critical Fashion Practice, an in-depth study of criticality in fashion design and a crucial reference for this project. Based on nine case studies, they discussed a new space for criticism within the fashion industry, where designers are actively challenging orthodox values and rethinking fashion’s role in society at large. In the present text, Geczy and Karaminas are building on their book to deepen our knowledge of critical fashion practice, starting with questions of definition and a historical background from anti-aristocratic fashion during the French revolution to the iconoclasm of early postmodern designers. The text also contains two detailed case studies centred on Jean-Paul Gaultier and Gucci’s Alessandro Michele, where they demonstrate how the two designers are using their practice to bring attention to critical discourses on fashion, sexuality and identity.
Critical Fashion Practice (CFP) is any piece, item, or work of fashion that announces a level of conceptual functionality that exceeds the capacity of simple clothing. What CFP shares with much contemporary art is the desire to place criticality at the epicentre of its concerns, that is, to challenge precepts about the world, jolt people from lethargic and lazily held views, destabilize ideologies, and to encourage ways of rethinking self and identity. In this regard, CFP can also be considered a metaphysics of clothing, in so far as its engagements exist outside of physical utility. Yet another way of characterising CFP is according to a basic binary. Everyday clothing designed for multiple uses and contexts is what we broadly call “hermetic”: this encompasses anything from T-shirts and business suits to twin sets and skirts. They are all hermetic because they announce themselves as not wishing to exist beyond the realms of clothing. Their aesthetics are within fixed, recognizable bounds, and their aim is pre-eminently that of utility. Such clothing can be fashionable and striking, like a blazing tie with a striking pattern, or a bright red dress, but the criterion of being noticeable does not necessarily mean that they serve a critical function. CFP occupies the realm of what we call “obtrusive”: these are garments that cause aesthetic rupture, and are clearly driven by an intention in excess of the material garment. Like art, CFP exists as both something in the world and in the mind. We would contend, furthermore, that since at least the 1990s, examples of CFP are on par if not exceed contemporary art for aesthetic and critical effect, in the way that it helps us to reflect authentically upon our being in the world.
I
There are no doubt a large array of overlaps between the two examples presented. To wear a bright flowing dress at a rally against cruelty in bullfighting, or to wear a suit as a transgender in a stage show, to name two random examples, are both driven by desires that suggest that the clothing is worn with foresight, and with expectations that the audience will respond in a way that runs counter to that of clothing that fits normative expectations. Perhaps the most democratic and commonplace form of CFP can be in the slogan T-shirt, especially when voicing subversive or controversial views. In such cases the garment is subservient to the message that it communicates, and acts as a vehicle, or armature, of communication. But we should not take this too far, for the slogan T-shirt is very much a reductive form of CFP and can be compared to activist art in which the “art” is subordinated to the message. At this point we may call upon Theodor Adorno’s corrective that politically committed art makes for bad art and bad politics. It is an observation that need not be taken to extremes, but it does help us to distinguish between different degrees of sophistication in CFP, where the best examples are seamless with the form and fabric in the absence of verbal declarations, or where object and text work together in dynamic friction.
CFP, which has its roots in the 1970s and ‘80s, pre-eminently with designers such as Vivienne Westwood and Rei Kawakubo, is very much a postmodern phenomenon as a result first of the dissemination of subcultural style, then in the dispersion of fashion itself into the virtual realm. Yet it does have its roots in modernism and the development of the fashion system itself. The fashion system, which emerged around the mid-nineteenth century, was as a result of many interconnected forces, coterminous with the formation of the modern, enlightened subject for whom there were identifiable rights, which also meant agency and freedom. The fashion system, as a system, was a network of legible registers that signified no longer just wealth and status but also aspiration and mobility. One could feasibly look more important and powerful than one really was, more how one wanted to be. Fashion cannot be deemed critical at this stage, but it can be said to serve an increasing number of social and signifying functions to which more and more people had access.
“Perhaps the most democratic and commonplace form of CFP can be in the slogan T-shirt, especially when voicing subversive or controversial views. In such cases the garment is subservient to the message that it communicates, and acts as a vehicle, or armature, of communication.”
In retrospect, we may assert that the first major signs of CFP arrive with the French Revolution in which appearances played an inordinate part in marking out social roles. From that time, we have the revolutionary figure wearing the Phrygian cap and sans-culottes which were essentially pants. The Phrygian cap was adopted because it was associated with the Roman goddess of liberty, Libertas, while the pants were named as such because they rejected the breeches that were worn below the knee with silk stockings, that were linked to the aristocracy (“aristocrat” was then a pejorative term). To dress in such a way was not only an expression of fealty to the new order, but also an expression of reproach to the old. While not examples of CFP per se, they are worth mentioning as they are examples of clothing being used in an anti-establishment way – as opposed to the traditional manner since antiquity where clothing is used to signify wealth and status. The cap and the pants during the Revolution also help us to reflect on the extent to which CFP is linked, however precariously, to ideology, which is also to say that it seeks to perform a social, political, even philosophical role, and where clothing becomes a rallying point for agency and belief.
Naturally, then, the next example in the chronology of progenitors to CFP is that of the bohemian and the dandy. After the writings of Charles Baudelaire, they become somewhat intertwined, although the dandy is more imbued with class and style, while the bohemian is more germane to forms of deviant behaviour and to heterodox beliefs. The flowing hair, the references to the middle ages or to Orientalism were all part of the bohemian stock-in-trade, deployed to register one’s apartness from bourgeois society. The bohemian strategies of exaggeration and provocation are still with us today, if in a more historicised and encoded form. When we come to the dandy he (mostly but not always he) is tantalizingly difficult to describe, as emphasised by one of the first to attempt to define him, himself a proud dandy, Jules Barbey D’Aurevilly. One of the reasons for this difficulty is that the dandy is not reducible to one dimension of appearance, and certainly not to clothing itself. Rather, in the dandy we see an intricate, and carefully curated melding of speech, gesture, clothing and accessory that coalesce for an effect in which the care and intention in appearance is preponderant. Hence the other term for the dandy, the aesthete, one who takes special care in how they are perceived. Where the dandy is especially important as an incipient example of CFP is the way in which it was a socio-sartorial modality for the covert expression of queer identity. The very difficulty to define the dandy became a fertile subterfuge, it was the cryptic surface on which to place content that was socially delicate, especially homosexuality. Men wishing to exhibit publicly their sexuality could do so within the flamboyant but still enigmatic matrix of the dandy persona. For what we see as a consistent thread of CFP is to find new and unconventional ways of conveying alternative, queer identities, the unusual nature of the fashion running parallel to unusual ways of being. With the dandy we can also locate the performativity inherent within CFP, where the criticality is embodied in a self-conscious construction of the self.
II
While these instances are important not to forget, the real turning point in CFP occurs in the 1970s, a time when protest and upheaval would inevitably find its way into clothing. After several decades of conservatism and uniformity, the new generation wished to find ways of creating identities that broke with the past. While often given credit for inventing punk style, Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood certainly played a major role in it. Since his death and because of the acrimony after they were no longer in partnership, the role of McLaren has also tended to be underplayed, however he had a strong lateral intelligence, and the ability to synthesise a multiplicity of influences. To begin with, they opened what is arguably the first concept fashion boutique at 430 King’s Road, London, that over its lifetime underwent a series of incarnations in name (Let it Rock; Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die; SEX; Seditionaries; World’s End), and in layout, each with its own specific theatrical setting. From the outset, the store did not limit itself to fashion alone, its variety of objects suggesting that the store catered to a lifestyle, primarily an alternative lifestyle. The concept store is relatively common today, but these stores accommodated to an idea, which went well beyond simply being a platform for the sale of goods.
One of the key early points of influence for McLaren and Westwood was Situationism, an off-shoot of Surrealism and form of Marxist activism not limited to art practice, which is also held to be one of the many causal factors in the student uprisings in Paris in May 1968. Visiting Paris during this time, what McLaren drew from Situationism were the notions of the dérive and détournement, that is, strategies of intervention that led to changes of perception about social conditions. They were deliberate means by which reveal cracks in the false continuity of “normal” and “decent” society (in this case postwar Britain), revealing its neuroses and hypocrisies. McLaren and Westwood set about designing clothing that would upset everyday conventions, doing more than just raising eyebrows, but inciting the audience with glaring provocations. One process of this was not to make clothing from scrap but to denature and improve on it—what today we called DIY, or “do it yourself”. Theirs was the first major instance of selling repurposed clothing, adding marks and prints, cutting off sleeves, and so on. One notable idea in these early pieces was to sew dried chicken bone onto a shirt. Another was to add rings and studs. When subjected to a more probing analysis, such clothing changed the ways class and status was traditionally inscribed within clothing—although these strategies and methods are hard to appreciate now as they have been appropriated so widely into fashion since.
Appropriation would come to be the strategy for which Westwood would excel. Appropriation was one of the buzz-words of postmodern art in the 1980s, referring to the ways in which artists purposely returned to the images or motifs of previous artists in order to force new interpretations that may have been repressed or hidden. The purpose of appropriation was theorised as deconstructionist, that is, revealing relationships – in signification, language, theory and so on – once presumed innocent but which conceal potentially repressive forces. That the rise of interest in investigating such things ran parallel to visual art at the time has been little discussed until now, and a symptom of the way in which the art world’s gatekeeping for its own self-interest. Westwood’s first major catwalk collection, “Pirate” (Autumn/Winter, 1981) used the pirate trope in the literal sense of the mythology of the brigands of the sea, with that of the still relatively new culture of music pirating. McLaren, one of the pioneers of music appropriation and mixing (read: pirating), was involved in the launch, with music from his proto-rap band Bow Wow Wow, and with sponsorship by Sony, who supplied the audience with Walkmans. The stripes, sashes, and other flowing garments would find endless echoes in the “New Romantic” fashions of the music industry throughout the decade, from Duran Duran to Adam Ant. “Pirate” therefore denoted an aesthetic of pseudo-illegality, drawing liberally from the French Revolution and to bohemianism, while appealing to the age of remixes, replays, reboots and remakes. It played loose with gender and class. For while there were references to the nobility of earlier centuries, it melded this with references to the ragpicker and proletariat, pointing to rebellion and the social margins.
In rethinking the shape, texture, look and silhouette of fashion, it is Kawakubo who was one of the prime exemplars of deconstruction in fashion, or rather “deconstructivism”, a term used for similar concepts as applied to architecture. Synonymous with the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, deconstruction looked closely at texts (textus means “weave” in Latin) beyond that of philosophy to show that belief systems of value were based on binary models whose basis was flimsier than once believed. Derrida once commented that his project was one undoing and decomposition, which, while taken by critics to a negative stance, could be seen more positively as breaking down things to their constituents and to evaluate them according to fresher principles that arose in the process of this decomposition. Derrida’s ideas also had a deep influence on many postmodern architects who were interested in finding solutions that did not comply with modernist design dictates of unity, symmetry and simplicity, in favour of designs that were more authentic to a disordered and plural universe – hence deconstructivism.
Contemporaneous with when Derrida’s philosophy was beginning to garner international acclaim, Kawakubo’s first major collection, “Destroy” (Spring/Summer, 1975) can easily be read in terms of a transposition of deconstructivism into fashion. It was indeed critically heralded as such from the start, albeit with the use of “deconstruction” in a rather literal as opposed to philosophical sense of simply dismantling. But more than that, Kawakubo introduced revolutionary concepts into the syntax of clothing that had been echoed by Westwood in a different context. That is, holes, textile burs, stressed fabrics, irregular weave and asymmetry. All of these sartorial interventions were extraordinary in rethinking how clothing could function, and of radically reorienting fashion aesthetics. Her innovations also gave way to a new term, la mode destroy. While Kawakubo strenuously denied it, these and related collections (such as “Holes” of Autumn/Winter 1982–83) referred directly to what many saw as a post-Hiroshima and Nagasaki aesthetic, which was a language of ruins, a language of incompleteness and vestiges as opposed to fullness and plenitude, something that Derrida also writes about.
Another later, significant contribution by Kawakubo in this vein was the “Body Meets Dress – Dress Meets Body” (Spring/Summer, 1997) collection, now more regularly referred to as her “Lumps and Bumps” collection. More forcefully than any designer before her, Kawakubo exploded the concept of the natural line of the body, interrupting the line of the garment with bumps and excrescences in unconventional places, to aesthetically jarring effect. These distortions were placed on garments that were potentially conventionally elegant, thereby perpetrating a somatic vandalism. The soft colours of bubble-gum pink, and baby blue in innocent gingham, connoting innocence and beauty, were subjected to distortions that were well outside of typical pathological deformity, leaving little doubt that the designer was taking away with ugliness whatever she was giving with beauty. Critics took delight in the audacity of Kawakubo’s efforts, going so far in one case of calling them cruel. Not only did the collection question entrenched perceptions and beliefs about body type, but it also engaged in a dialogue with the Japanese love of packaging, and the minor art form of tsutsumi. Beyond that, any Japanese girl who has gone through the ritual of kimono would relate to the uncomfortable pressures and constrictions on the body because of the prosthetic wadding imposed on it. Kawakubo’s major retrospective at the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum, New York in 2017, established herself beyond measure as a designer who has made us rethink the body, cultural inheritance, memory, and more besides. It is now hard to deny the confluence of fashion and art, as of CFP and its ability to help us to engage with self and world in stimulating and unexpected ways. What follows are a set of more detailed case studies not covered in the book, Critical Fashion Practice,1 centred on Jean-Paul Gaultier and Alessandro Michele.
III
Gender has always been at the centre of debates about fashion, sexuality and identity and at the forefront of CFP. As an embodied practice, fashion and dress act as a confessional: it tells people who we are and who we are not and enunciates a subject position. Discourses of gender control the body in similar ways to how fashion governs and dictates the body’s appearance. Jean-Paul Gaultier rose to prominence as a designer in the late ‘80s and ‘90s about the same time that queer theory was gaining ground in academic circles. It was a period that was characterized by an intense outpouring of creativity across the fields of fashion and music that challenged ideas of sexuality and gender. The flamboyant androgynous dressing, khol eye make-up, lipstick and mullet hair style adopted by the Glam and New Romantic pop stars of the ‘70s and ‘80s such as David Bowie and the propensity to wear make-up by straight and non-straight, alike, made the boundaries of gender and sexual orientation even more tenuous. The club scene became an important venue where sexual experimentation, gender and fashion coalesced. New Romantic bands such as Ultra Vox, Spandau Ballet, Duran Duran, Adam and the Ants and Culture Club wore androgynous clothing, lipstick, and eyeliner that coincided with the look of the gay clone; muir caps, handlebar moustaches, leather pants and jackets, motorcycle boots and leather harnesses. Lesbians translated this gender-bending style into a street style that included high-waisted stone wash-jeans, white T-shirts with rolled up sleeves and Doc Marten lace-up boots. Butch or “diesel” lesbians wore their hair in a “mullet” with the top cropped short and the sides and the back remained long. Young lesbians began to re-visit and re-define the butch-femme roles, cross-dressing, role-playing and gender switching. Then came the crash of the first diagnoses of AIDS in 1981 and queer style became more about political activism. Political statements appeared emblazoned on T-shirts, leather jackets, muscle shirts and sweatshirts.
It was within this subcultural milieu that Gaultier began designing garments that challenged hegemonic values and turned the unorthodox into mainstream. His womenswear garments are constructed to be worn by the male body and vice-versa. In the ‘80s and ‘90s his male models wore corsets, skirts and jewelled bodices and women were dressed as sailors with leather biker jackets and cone bustiers. Their bodies were pierced or heavily tattooed and he often chose to use generously proportioned models such as singer-song writer Beth Ditto with whom he collaborated on a black plus-size T-shirt with a cheeky print of Madonna’s corset designed by Gaultier from her Blond Ambition Tour (1990). It was Madonna’s corset, with its seditious mix of sexual power and eroticism, that testified to Gaultier’s rising reputation as an enfant terrible. Over the next 29 years, the corset would undergo various iterations, becoming a staple garment in Gaultier’s collections as he played with its implications of tight-lacing, fetish history and the feminine. While Gaultier’s women are sexually confident, his men are feminised: they are adorned in furs, leggings, skirts and every form of military uniform is indulged in his collections, from the sailor’s Breton shirt to the cod piece (Autumn/Fall, 1997). In Gaultier’s hands, men become flamboyant and women are no longer passive but are sexual aggressors bearing the signs of the dominatrix: bustles, bras and corsets with extended canonical breasts that mimic huge phalluses.
Gaultier is not interested in conventional hegemonic values, for he revels in designing garments that agitate and make political statements. In 2006 Gaultier recruited plus size model Velvet d’Amour, who was 5 feet eight inches tall and weighed 300 pounds, for his 2007 Spring/Summer ready-to-wear collection to draw attention to the debate that was being played out by the media concerning the use of skinny models on catwalks. Once again for his Autumn/Winter 2018 couture show in Paris, Gaultier drew attention to the ways in which women’s breasts have been sexually objectified by sending models down the runway wearing matching flared tuxedo pants and clear perspex corsets with the slogan “free the nipple.” Gaultier’s response was in support of the #freethenipple movement whose aim is to confront the naked censorship policy on social media platforms Instagram and Facebook and to demonstrate the prevalence of sexism.
Gaultier has also made the uniform a staple of his collections because it speaks of authority and power as a form of disciplinary practice. Uniforms occupy a place of transgression, since a uniform occupies a sartorial state of belonging and is a statement of conformity, it lends itself to forms of debasement that question the authority that it is meant to affirm. That is, when uniforms are worn out of uniformity, in terms of the individual outside of the group, they are liable to have the opposite function, by drawing attention to human tendencies toward blind obedience. Gaultier’s Summer/Spring 1993 prêt-à-porter collection contained garments that captured the erotic tension of school uniforms and play. Raised shirt collars, loose ties, exaggerated trousers pulled up under the armpits and buckled with a tight belt and reversed school boy shorts with a belt, open and hung loose across the thighs. But it is the sailor’s uniform with its rough and hypermasculine sexual connotations and its association with discipline and pleasure that has become Gaultier’s signature style. Even adopting the sailor style as part of his own wardrobe, wearing the striped Breton shirt with a kilt, leather pants and black military boots or lace up Doc Martens. Gaultier’s first interpretation of the sailor suit was in his “Tattoo” collection for Spring/Summer 1994. Using “body stocking tops,” models appeared to have “flesh” tattoos on their torsos consistent with motifs in the sailor tattoo lexicon, such as anchors, mermaids and ships. Gaultier also reinterpreted the sailor-striped sweater by giving it an open back for his “Bad Toy” menswear collection and for his Spring/Summer 2010 collection, a crop top for his “Retro” collection for Spring/Summer 2007 and translated the sailor’s pant into a scant (better known as a male skirt), for his menswear Spring/Summer 2010 collection. The skirt was designed with the two trouser legs cut wide apart and a panel of fabric wrapping around the front of the trousers. Like the corset and the sailor’s uniform in all its stylistic interpretations, the men’s skirt would become a staple in Gaultier’s collections.
“For Haraway, the cyborg was the answer towards the path of gender equality, for Michele the cyborg acts as a trope to highlight that the slippery categories that we have used to make sense of the world and our place within it are no longer valid.”
In 2013 Gucci launched “Chime for Change”, a gender equity campaign that supported girls and women’s empowerment through access to education, health care and justice. Headed by the Kering Foundation and featuring Salma Hayek-Pinault and Beyoncé Knowles-Carter, the campaign used social media, a concert, films and editorial to raise global awareness and call for mobilisation and action to stop violence and improve women’s lives. Since then, Gucci has organised several campaigns and initiatives targeting young people including a biannual report with Irregular Labs, a Generation Z think tank that surveys people aged 13 to 24 about their feelings on how fashion impacts on gender. Most recently, Gucci partnered with Irregular Labs and “Chime for Change” in the film The Future is Fluid (2019), directed by Jade Jackman and produced by Black Dog Films. The film features non-binary and cisgender western and non-western post millennials talking about what gender means to generation Z and how they envision a future without gender boundaries and borders. What has come to be termed as “gender fluidity”, the ability to choose a gender and sexual identity that goes beyond female, male, gender non-conforming (GNC) and queer. In other words, gender fluidity is concerned with the ways in which the multiplicity and fragmentation of gender will effect cultural systems, education, economics and politics, changing the ways in which we will perceive humanity and life.
Under the creative directorship of Alessandro Michele, Gucci has become a lynchpin brand in the gender-free movement whose catwalk shows cross pollinate genders and even species. For Gucci’s 2018/19 Autumn/Winter collection presented at Milan Fashion Week, aptly named “Cyborg”, two models, a man and a woman, emerge holding replicas of their own heads and props of a baby dragon and a chameleon lizard, and some, not all, possess extra eyeballs. Taking Donna Haraway’s essay A Cyborg Manifesto (1985) as a springboard to explore notions of the constructedness of gender, Michele’s collection called for a revaluation (and rejection) of rigid gender boundaries in favour of a more “fluid” notion of what constitutes the human. It is through the metaphorical figure of the cyborg, that Haraway envisioned a move away from traditional and restrictive notions of gender as masculine and feminine to a mode of thinking that encapsulated the human as an amalgamation of animal and machine. For Haraway, the cyborg was the answer towards the path of gender equality, for Michele the cyborg acts as a trope to highlight that the slippery categories that we have used to make sense of the world and our place within it are no longer valid. Instead, the collection is a radical rethinking of the human and asks the question what does it mean to be human? Or, more precisely, what if anything is the idea of a human?
The catwalk installation was designed as a suite of operating theatres where a procession of post-human models paraded past surgical lights and tables. The space acts as a site where technological apparatus’ or machines manage the transformations between human and other species. In this way, the theatre was intended as a metaphor for the posthuman condition, where people construct their identities and undergo regeneration through technology. As a form of CFP, the Cyborg collection is a response to the modification of the human species through genetic engineering, digital technology and bioengineering. Like Haraway, who imagined a world without gender, without genesis and without an end, Michele imagines a time where identities are neither mutable or fixed but can be adjusted, redefined and even imagined in a Gucci “pluriverse”, where humans are a hybrid mix of animal species and technology.
Gucci’s catwalk shows have female models wearing men’s collections and vice-versa, all in mismatched fabrics and styles that contain clashing aesthetics and cross-cultural references that are by and large, quintessentially Gucci: enormous glasses, argyle jumpers, costume jewellery and the use of heavy floral brocades. In Michele’s “Cyborg” collection, Hollywood’s Paramount Films finds its place on a jumper with a Chinese neckline and the release poster of 1965 American exploitation film Faster Pussycat, Kill, Kill, Kill (Russ Meyer, dir.) is printed on a jumper worn by a model wearing a face mask in the style of a Moslem niquab. Then there are pussy-bow blouses, silky shorts and handbags and high heeled patent leather Dorothy boots for men and oversized suits and blazers for women as gender constructions break free and the very slipperiness of gender is made transparent.
“CFP values, like all critical research, a discourse that is speculative and discursive over an aesthetic of resolution and completeness.”
Conclusion
CFP is a mode of contextual practice that fashion designers use to bring attention to the way that clothes participate in critical discourses and political action. It engages with socially discursive dimensions, as well as placing a priority on the articulation of taste and creative innovation. CFP values, like all critical research, a discourse that is speculative and discursive over an aesthetic of resolution and completeness. In other words, it follows an approach to aesthetics that constantly challenges the beautiful and the good. ⬤
Endnotes
Dr Adam Geczy is an artist and writer who teaches at Sydney College of the Arts, a Faculty of the University of Sydney. With Vicki Karaminas he has co-edited Fashion and Art (2012), and co-written Queer Style (2013). His Fashion and Orientalism was also released in 2013. Recent titles include Fashion’s Double: Representations of Fashion in Painting, Photography and Film (with Vicki Karaminas, 2015), Artificial Bodies in Fashion and Art (2016), Critical Fashion Practice: From Westwood to van Beirendonck (with Vicki Karaminas, 2017), What is Performance Art? Australian Perspectives (co-edited with Mimi Kelly, 2018), Transorientalism in Art, Fashion and Film: Inventions of Identity (2019), The End of Fashion (co-edited with Vicki Karaminas, 2018), and Fashion Installation: Body, Space and Performance (with Vicki Karaminas, 2019).
Vicki Karaminas is Professor of Fashion and Director of Doctoral Studies for the School of Design at the College of Creative Arts, Massey University, New Zealand. She has edited the following books with Adam Geczy: Fashion and Art (2012) and The End of Fashion: Clothing and Dress in the Age of Globalization (2018). She has also authored with Adam Geczy the books Queer Style (2013), Fashion’s Double: Representations of Fashion in Painting, Photography and Film (2015), Critical Fashion Practice: From Westwood to Van Beirendonck (2017), Fashion and Masculinities in Popular Culture (2017), Fashion Installation: Body, Space and Performance (2018), and Libertine Fashion: Sexual Rebellion and Style (2020). She is the associate editor of the journal Critical Studies in Men’s Fashion, and is a member of advisory and editorial boards of a number of international journals.