Nordic Fashion Studies

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NORDIC FASHION STUDIES Peter McNeil, Louise Wallenberg


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Foreword Louise Wallenberg Introduction Peter McNeil Femininity and Beauty Practices in Soviet Russia in the 1950-1960s Yulia Gradskova “Men can be Attractive and a Little Sexy…” Swedish Unisex Fashion in the 1960s and 1970s Patrik Steorn The Challenge of the“New Masculinity”: Conservative Reactions to a New Consumption Ethos Jacob Östberg

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19 37 37

Guiding Mothers: On Sexualization of Children in Vogue Bambini Annamari Vänskä

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Size Zero. The Pathological Body as the Aesthetic Benchmark Angela Rundquist

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Dressed Up for the International Market: A Study of the Danish Fashion Fair Promoting the Danish Fashion Industry, 1947 – 1970 Birgit Lyngbye Pedersen Managing Desire: The International Fashion Model Cecilie Basberg Neumann

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“Preaching to the Already Converted” — On Niche Fashion Magazine Readership Ane Lynge-Jorlén

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Forbidden Dandyism: Imperial Aesthetics in Contemporary Russia Maria Engström

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“Sizes are arbitrary, you can’t trust them”. A Study of the Relationship Between Size Labeling and Actual Clothing Sizes Kirsi Laitala, Benedicte Hauge, and Ingun Grimstad Klepp The Visible and the Non-Visible: Underwear in an Inventory of Female Working-Class Clothing, 1860-1870 Lisa Öberg Fashion Houses Peter McNeil Rock Military Style: Motivations Behind the Military Look of 1960s Rock Musicians Michael A. Langkjær

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225 245

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Coppola’s Marie Antoinette: Costume and Sensibility Therése Andersson

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Training the Aesthetics Daniel Koch

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Contributors

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The Centre for Fashion Studies at Stockholm University was inaugurated in 2006, and has since become a place where both research and teaching is conducted successfully, and where international scholars and students meet, work, and develop projects together. The majority of our faculty and staff are Swedish, but the Centre is also host to a number of guest researchers and lecturers from North America, the UK and other European countries. As most research on fashion has been published in English, by Anglo-Saxon scholars, this is not surprising. While Anglo-Saxon research is most welcome, and perhaps necessary, for an academic subject still in creation, its dominance in the classroom is problematic. Given that our students tend to have a different cultural background, the Anglo-Saxon focus can at times become limiting. At the introductory level most of the students are Swedish and/or Scandinavian, and at the advanced master’s level, our students come from all over the world. So far we have had students from Japan, Greece, Russia, Italy, Taiwan, Germany, USA, Belgium, Pakistan, Ireland, Brazil, Slovenia, Poland, England and Austria. The environment is indeed crosscultural. Further, fashion studies as a subject is not only interdisciplinary—crossing the lines between the humanities and the social sciences, from art history and film studies to sociology and business studies it is also, or it becomes, cross-cultural and cross-national, because of the diverse backgrounds of those who study it. When Professor Peter McNeil and I decided to organize a Nordic workshop in 2008, inviting fashion scholars from Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Iceland and Norway, we envisioned a meeting that would put Nordic fashion studies at its centre, having Nordic scholars meet and discuss the importance, the vii


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obstacles, and the possibilities of fashion studies in the Nordic countries. Apart from having scholars meet across national and disciplinary borders, we also wanted to bring together fashion scholars of various academic status: PhD students, lecturers with heavy teaching loads, post-doctoral fellows and senior faculty. Further, we wanted scholars from the humanities and social sciences to meet with scholars from professional schools of art and design. With a rather short call for papers to a Nordic workshop that went out in March 2008, we expected a handful of participants. We were therefore happily surprised when approximately 45 people from universities, university colleges and art and design schools in Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden contacted us and wanted to participate. During one single day in May 2008 we met, presenting our research in small streams, discussing similarities and differences between various national and educational forms for doing and teaching fashion studies, and expanding our Nordic networks and possibilities for teaching and research collaboration. It became very clear to us during that day that there was enough material for producing an anthology. At the closing session, I therefore made a call for abstracts to what we envisioned to be the first interdisciplinary Nordic anthology on fashion studies. What you now have in your hands is the result: the various articles cover design history, film studies, marketing, gender studies, history, ethnography, literature and business history. It is my sincere hope that it will be of interest to students, teachers and researchers alike, in different areas of study and in various schools, universities and colleges, and that it will offer perspectives and topics that so far have been missing from most reading lists in fashion studies. Louise Wallenberg


FASHION MEANS MUCH more than dress. There are fashions in all aspects of life, from the time and manner of taking meals to the ways in which people sit. Clothes are animated by bodies moving in space, through gesture and deportment, and attitudes towards work and leisure that have changed dramatically across culture and time. The dressed body occupies space in coded ways that are learned through socialisation and that are also subject to fashion. This anthology explores the multi-dimensions of fashion, from the market to the imagination. Fashion, a series of experts argue, is relational and weighty, yet still figures in the media and popular imagination as nebulous and opaque. This anthology seeks to overturn that popular view, introducing readers to new ways of conceptualising their interest and participation in fashion past and present. AXL BOOKS WWW.AXLBOOKS.COM ISBN 978-91-978598-9-9

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Lars Nilson, Game is Over (2000). Courtesy of the Artist.


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