Cultural
Studies
Fashion, Style
& Popular Culture
Call for Papers for a Special Issue:
Fashion and Appropriation
Guest Editors: Denise Nicole Green & Susan B. Kaiser
Call for
Papers
ISSN 2050-0726
Online ISSN 2050-0734
3 issues per volume
Volume 1, 2014
Abstracting and Indexing
IBZ; IBR; Design & Applied Arts
Index (DAAI); ERIH PLUS
Principal Editor
Joseph H. Hancock, II
Drexel University
jhh33@drexel.edu
Associate Editors
Shaun Cole
London College of Fashion
s.r.cole@fashion.arts.ac.uk
Patricia A. Cunningham
Ohio State University
TCunningham@ehe.osu.edu
Susan Kaiser
University of California, Davis
sbkaiser@ucdavis.edu
Veronica Manlow
Brooklyn College
veronica.manlow@gmail.com
Anne Peirson-Smith
City University of Hong Kong
annepeirsonsmith@me.com
Reviews Editor
Jessica Strubel
University of North Texas
Jessica.Strubel@unt.edu
From Native American headdresses worn by festival-goers at Coachella to Valentino’s recent
Spring/Summer 2016 runway show inspired by ‘wild, tribal Africa’, cultural appropriation is
rampant in western fashion. This issue of Fashion, Style & Popular Culture will examine, critique,
and contextualize modes of appropriation in the fashion system through producers, consumers,
indigenous communities and the media.
In the mid-aughts, debates around cultural appropriation moved into the blogosphere and
popular press. The term ‘cultural appropriation’ has become the vernacular used to interpret
and criticize contemporary fashions. While popular culture has finally acknowledged cultural
appropriation in public discourse, Euro-American fashion has had a long-standing historical
relationship to appropriation, exoticism, and the use of ‘the Other’ for design ‘inspiration’.
Analysis of cultural appropriation, from both historical and contemporary perspectives, requires
us to question power relationships, inequalities, and answer the ultimate question: who is
benefitting and profiting from cultural appropriation?
Authors are invited to submit papers that explore the following:
• Cultural appropriation as design process
• Politics of design ‘inspiration’ and the creative process
• Commodification of cultural styles by the fashion industry
• Historical examples of cultural appropriation and intersections with power dynamics
• Political and economic implications of what does (and does not) get appropriated in
popular fashion
• Everyday appropriation, identity negotiation and ambivalence
• Intersections of race, gender, class, sexuality, and/or religion with appropriation in fashion
• Performativity, ambiguity, appropriation and the body
• Critical analysis of the debate between ‘cultural appropriation’ and ‘cultural appreciation’
• Media representations of cultural appropriation in the fashion industry
• Interface of economics and appropriation within the fashion industry
• Colonialism and power relationships as articulated through fashion
• Consumer response to cultural appropriation
• Legal aspects of cultural appropriation
• Political stakes and the scale of cultural appropriation in style and fashion
• Postmodernism and the impossibility of the unique
Manuscripts should be approximately 5000 words and prepared using the Intellect Journal
House Style, which may be accessed at: http://www.intellectbooks.co.uk/MediaManager/File/
Intellect%20style%20guide.pdf.
Deadline for 1–2 page abstract: 15 February 2016
Deadline for complete manuscript: 1 September 2016
Please send abstracts to: Denise Nicole Green (dng22@cornell.edu) and
Susan B. Kaiser (sbkaiser@ucdavis.edu)
For questions regarding submissions or inquiries regarding the journal, Fashion, Style & Popular
Culture, please contact Principal Editor, Joseph Hancock: Jhh33@drexel.edu
Intellect Journals
www.intellectbooks.com