Crossroads in Cultural Studies Conference 14-17th December 2016 Program Index

7F
Fashion and the City: Towards a Comparative Cultural Ecology of Urban Chic (Chair, Rosie Findlay)
Over the last decades, Cultural Studies has developed sophisticated methodological frameworks to engage with the
complexities of contemporary multicultural, cosmopolitan, and economically increasingly divided cities and their
global imaginaries. Our panel will engage this discussion through the lenses of fashion and style. The three proposed
papers present comparative approaches to second-tier global cities in Australia, Europe, and the United States in an
attempt to tease out how the specific “chic” of a city is constituted, negotiated and contested in its relation to
patterns of migration histories (both of people and images), memories and activist interventions.
Felicity Perry
Cities
“Understated” Melbourne and “Brash” Sydney: Complicating the Narratives of Australia’s Fashion
Fashion is a “memorializing” practice which underpins our comprehension of space and time as vividly as the
built environment or the social, economic and cultural infrastructures through which its forms and shifting
meanings are manifested” (Breward, 2004:16). This paper asks how fashion is used to memorialize Sydney
and Melbourne, cities which have long been rivals competing for resources and reputation, including the
hosting rights for Australian Fashion Week. Each city draws itself in opposition to the other: sunny, sexy
Sydney versus frosty, frumpy Melbourne; intellectual Melbourne versus money-hungry Sydney. How do the
fashion spheres of each city support and challenge these narratives? Further, how do these narratives stand
in relation to the (re)framing of the fashion of Melbourne and Sydney in the service of a national
“Australian” fashion?
Markus Reisenleitner
Memorializing, Performing and Reclaiming Latina/o Identities in Los Angeles and Santa Fe
“LA’s growing cool factor on the global fashion stage” (LA Times, 10 Nov 2013) is based on reclaiming the
city’s downtown, art and fashion districts for the multiethnic flaneuse on foot and promotes an image of a
pedestrian-friendly, walkable, ecologically healthy Los Angeles by obliquely referencing historical imaginaries
of Los Angeles’s pseudo-Hispanic lineage and folding them into what is now understood, and represented in
the digital mediascape, as street style. In this current and ongoing rebranding of Los Angeles as a city with a
walkable core, fashion and street style operate as apposite props for performing new urbanist principles of
retro civic sociability on an urban stage that blurs the line between material traces of (often violent and
painful) histories and imagineered sets of city branding. In this paper I discuss the role Latino lineage (both in
its contemporary, imagined and mediated dimension and in its historically suppressed and ghostly aspects)
plays in re-shaping contemporary LA’s image, fashion, and urban spaces. Comparing Los Angeles’s reimagineering
with Santa Fe, a much smaller city that has successfully established and maintained a
consistent imaginary for at least a century, can reveal what constitutes, mediates and transports the desire
and need for “placing” fashion in location-specific histories.
Susan Ingram
Locating History and/as Fashion in Berlin and Vienna
This paper demonstrates how Berlin’s and Vienna’s historical imaginaries inform the ways in which their
fashion systems have been responding to contemporary global pressures brought about by the influx of
capital, goods and people. It thus adds an imperial dimension to Doreen Massey’s argument about the
identity of modern places being constituted as much by their relation with other places as by anything
intrinsic to their location by showing how the corporate-driven changes these cities have been undergoing
since the fall of the Berlin Wall compare to the nationally tinged ones they experienced at the turn of the
20th century.
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