Fashioning Identity - (Dress and Fashion Research) by Maria Mackinney-Valentin (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

We dress to communicate who we are, or who we would like others to think we are, telling seductive fashion narratives through our adornment. Yet, today, fashion has been democratized through high-low collaborations, social media and real-time fashion mediation, complicating the basic dynamic of identity displays, and creating tension between personal statements and social performances.

Fashioning Identity explores how this tension is performed through fashion production and consumption, by examining a diverse series of case studies - from ninety-year old fashion icons to the paradoxical rebellion in 'normcore', and from soccer jerseys in Kenya to heavy metal band T-shirts in Europe. Through these cases, the role of time, gender, age memory, novelty, copying, the body and resistance are considered within the context of the contemporary fashion scene. Offering a fresh approach to the subject by readdressing Fred Davis' seminal concept of 'identity ambivalence' in Fashion, Culture and Identity (1992), Mackinney-Valentin argues that we are in an epoch of 'status ambivalence', in which fashioning one's own identity has become increasingly complicated.

Review Quotes

Fashioning Identity provides fresh and compelling insights into fashion as a form of identity, both individually and collectively, across cultures from Copenhagen to Kenya. Offering insightful analysis and grounded case studies of contemporary fashion trends, from normcore and counterfeit fashion to the ubiquity of leopard print and soccer shirts, the book illustrates the universal symbolic construction of identity through fashion. This is a must-read and valuable companion for students and scholars of fashion alike.

Fashioning Identity provides a highly accessible, straightforward and original account of the central issues surrounding identity in fashion, from heavy metal bands to globalized soccer uniforms. This book will be of interest and use to all students of the subject.

About the Author

Maria Mackinney-Valentin is an Associate Professor at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, School of Design, Denmark.