Book summary “Fashion and Cultural Studies”: summary

Introduction

You often view fashion as a superficial industry or a purely Western phenomenon. This narrow perspective makes it difficult to understand how everyday clothing connects to global systems of power, identity, and culture. You need a comprehensive framework to decode the complex meanings behind what you wear every day.

Susan B. Kaiser offers a cultural studies approach that transcends rigid binaries. The book explores style, fashion, and dress across transnational boundaries, gender, class, and sexuality. You will learn to see clothing as a dynamic medium of social negotiation.

The book addresses several key questions about your daily choices and global systems:

• How do transnational networks shape the clothes in your wardrobe?
• In what ways do race, class, and gender intersect through dress?
• How can you read fashion as a serious site of cultural meaning?

1. Theoretical Foundations and Models

Traditional Western thought relies on rigid either/or binary oppositions. These frameworks oversimplify power dynamics and marginalize alternative practices. You see them in hierarchical divides like future versus past or masculinity versus femininity.

Studying fashion requires a both/and perspective and the circuit of style-fashion-dress model to navigate complex cultural flows.

Adopting a both/and perspective allows you to explore contradictions, ambivalences, and third terms that fall between these divides. The mathematical metaphor of the Möbius strip illustrates this convergence. Invented by mathematician Augustus Möbius, the ribbon with a single twist demonstrates how an object possesses two sides while operating as one continuous surface. In fashion studies, this metaphor models how time and space, or structure and agency, cannot be separated during the embodied experience of dressing.

Transnaming Binaries

Style, fashion, and dress operate as an interconnected system of concepts where each term highlights distinct processes of the clothed body. Carol Tulloch defines style as personal agency and self-telling through assembled garments. Joanne Eicher defines dress neutrally as body modifications and supplements. Fashion operates as a collective social process in flux with time. Together, style-fashion-dress bridges individual creative expression with historical and social structures.

Articulation functions simultaneously as a cultural concept of bodily connection and as an analytical method to deconstruct naturalized wholes. Derived from the physical joints of speech organs, articulation describes how you mix and match disparate clothing elements to express temporary subjectivities. As a research method, it involves breaking down seemingly harmonious cultural wholes to reveal internal fractures and rearticulating them into new interpretive frameworks.

A wedding guest in Washington State in the year 2010 wears a rented tuxedo mandated by cultural norms. He adds an indie rock record company cap to express his personal musical identity and soften his formal look.

The Circuit Model

The circuit of style-fashion-dress model traces cultural flows across interconnected sites without reducing fashion to a simple linear pipeline. Adapted from the cultural studies circuit of culture, this model maps five non-linear processes:

• production;
• distribution;
• consumption;
• subject formation;
• regulation.

It emphasizes that materials and images circulate through complex detours rather than moving strictly from factories to passive consumers.

2. Transnationalism and Assumptions

Appearance is an unavoidable social process that forms a fundamental part of human subject formation and subjectivity. You cannot avoid participating in the visual world or cultural conversations surrounding style-fashion-dress. This styling of the body is an ongoing mechanism for exploring identity and negotiating agency within cultural structures, heavily influenced by everyday routines termed habitus.

Fashion is a transnational phenomenon rooted in intersectional subject positions and the material negotiation of ambiguity.

A Muslim female weightlifter navigates agency and structure by wearing a headscarf, covering her arms and legs as part of her daily habitus.

Dominant historical narratives falsely localize the birth of fashion solely in Renaissance Italy and French courts, ignoring rich non-Western style histories in Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Western hegemony perpetuates the myth that fashion is purely a white, bourgeois, European phenomenon through pervasive cultural discourses and power dynamics. Historian Sarah-Grace Heller demonstrates that full-blown fashionable values were evident in Europe since at least the twelfth century, proving fashionability is relative and depends on the prioritization of novelty.

The Aesthetics of the Unavoidable

Subject formation requires navigating multiple, intersecting subject positions such as nationality, race, ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality. Intersectionality prevents essentialist perspectives by showing how various dimensions of identity simultaneously overlap and interact. These subject positions act like three-dimensional, rotating globes with permeable boundaries that shift in salience depending on context and power dynamics.

Gay activist Harry Hay wore an ensemble at the New York Gay Pride Parade that juxtaposed military camouflage with a petticoat-like skirt, visually articulating his intersectional gender and sexual positions alongside his spiritual affinity with Native American culture.

Identity in fashion is best understood through the metaphor of entanglement and (k)nots rather than strict binary oppositions. While you can easily articulate what you are not through words, visual style allows you to express complex, entangled realities that defy binary categories. Tracing cultural flows like the African diaspora reveals how mutual aesthetic influences and uneven power relations create rich transnational entanglements.

African American designers and consumers create and wear dashikis made from West African printed fabrics, while artisans in Dakar, Senegal, simultaneously adapt African American styles and prints.

Negotiating Ambiguity

Structures of feeling link everyday emotions like ambiguity, ambivalence, and anxiety to collective cultural changes through fashion. Ambiguity in clothing allows for mixed metaphors and ironic play, while cultural ambivalence stems from unresolved subjective tensions such as youth versus age or conformity versus rebellion. Cultural anxiety introduces a free-floating sense of uncertainty that functions as a precise signal of coming social and artistic changes. Gregory Stone argued that ambiguous appearances require mindful interpretation by perceivers, fostering deeper social interaction and new negotiations of meaning.

The negotiation of fashion ambiguity is a material, uneven process heavily shaped by global capitalism, cultural appropriation, and labor power relations. Historical colonisation involved European borrowing of non-Western technologies and textile traditions while suppressing local industries. In contemporary global capitalism, fast fashion and retailers rely on flexible manufacturing, cultural appropriation, and complex international supply chains.

Between 1664 and 1678, the value of the English East India Company’s imported Indian cotton textiles represented 60 to 70 percent of their trade before being banned in 1721 to protect domestic manufacturers.

3. Nations and Globalization

National identities are imagined communities expressed through gendered clothing, historical mapping, and globalized production networks.

A nation is not a fixed essence or a thing with a wholly distinct culture. It functions as an imagined community that must continually re-create itself to foster belonging. Because citizens cannot interact face-to-face on a daily basis, nations rely on shared storytelling and imagination. Dominant cultures often appropriate national narratives by claiming a coherence and uniformity that are more imagined than real.

Nearly 200 nations exist at the time of writing, not all of which officially belong to the United Nations. You can observe how Miss Mexico 2010 Ximena Navarrete wore a red gown to represent the 200th anniversary of Mexico's independence. She also wore a custom gown celebrating the Kukulcán Pyramids, consciously linking her body to the body politic on the global stage.

Imagined Communities

Modern European nations used rural and peasant attire to construct a nostalgic sense of authentic national identity amidst the anxieties of industrialization. Dress historian Lou Taylor notes that while rural peasant attire was historically constantly shifting, museums and nationalists represented it as fixed between 1850 and 1914. Royal and aristocratic landowners supported preserving rural ways of life due to concerns about rural poverty and migration to cities. Unofficial forms of ethnic and rural dress like the French beret, Scottish kilt, and German lederhosen serve today to capture a nostalgic sense of an imagined community.

Cultural studies scholar Stuart Hall distinguishes between two major hegemonic models of globalization driven by different historical and cultural forces. The British model of globalization was based on colonization and the construction of English identity as a specific ethnicity defined against foreign others. In contrast, the U.S. model relies on transnational mass culture, global capitalism, and the myth of a melting pot that absorbs and appropriates difference. Companies like American Anthropologie and Forever 21, Spanish Zara, Italian Benetton, British Topshop, and Swedish H&M represent the U.S. model of transnational hybridization.

Historical and Political Dress

Sixteenth-century costume books attempted to map the world and organize global diversity through the classification of national costumes, reflecting early modern cultural anxieties. Cesare Vecellio published encyclopedic costume books in 1590 and 1598 to decipher national character through style-fashion-dress. By categorizing foreign cultures as exotic relative to an Italian norm, these texts provided a sense of world order during a time when traditional moral and social boundaries were blurring. In Vecellio's 1590 work Habiti, the Italian national character was illustrated not by a single costume, but as a naked man carrying wool cloth on his shoulder. This symbolized that Italy was too complex and varied for a single dress.

European imperialism and colonialism were intertwined with the global trade of luxury textiles and raw materials, generating ideological tensions regarding masculine national identity. While the British state supported imperial expansion and the lucrative North American fur trade, nationalist discourses championed domestic wool as the material and symbol of virile, masculine tailoring to fend off foreign, feminine influences like French silk. The Hudson Bay Company was established in 1670 to dominate indigenous hunting and gathering modes, making North America a major source of wealth for Western Europe.

The French Revolution used style-fashion-dress as a high-stakes political tool to reject royalist excess, aristocratic hierarchy, and Catholic authority in favor of republican nationalism. Revolutionaries replaced aristocratic breeches and lavish court styles with working-class long trousers and revolutionary colors. Enlightenment writers debated whether to introduce a national uniform, though opponents argued it would stifle individual freedom. An aristocratic man's vest from the French Revolution features red, white, and blue colors, a caterpillar and a clipped butterfly representing social transformation, and the slogan "L'habit ne fait pas le moine" on the pocket.

During the Chinese Cultural Revolution, strict political conformity enforced a rigid dress code that eliminated traditional and Western bourgeois fashion, though subtle personal adaptations persisted. Mao Zedong and the Communist Party rejected both Western fashion and ancient Chinese garments between 1966 and 1976. Millions of young people wore olive-green military uniforms of the Red Guard as a symbol of revolutionary purity. Women infused subtle touches of femininity by decorating inner collars or scarves with floral patterns, while maximizing garment lifespan through the widespread practice of mending and patching.

4. Ethnicity, Race, and Religion

Cultural studies scholars view categories like race and ethnicity as fluid subject positions shaped by changing hierarchies and power relations. You constantly navigate between processes of belonging to a community and differentiating yourself from others, using clothing and physical styling to articulate your identity. Nations like China and Kenya contain numerous distinct ethnic groups with overlapping forms of dress, making a single authoritative checklist or essentialist national identity impossible. China recognizes 56 state-recognized ethnic groups, while Kenya contains more than 40 state-recognized and close to 70 distinct ethnic communities.

Race, ethnicity, and religion function as dynamic subject positions that intersect with hair politics, legal frameworks, and transnational faith fashion.

Racial Formation and Hair Politics

The meanings of race and ethnicity transformed historically from broad tribal or religious community memberships into biological classifications used to justify slavery and colonization. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, modern biological sciences categorized physical markers like skin color and hair texture to justify slavery and conquest under capitalism. Between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, slave merchants sold approximately 2.5 million African slaves primarily to the Americas within a capitalist trade network involving textiles, slaves, sugar, and spices. The 1960s civil rights movements disrupted the old melting pot assimilation model, replacing it with identity politics and multicultural discourses.

Hair texture and styling operate as a key site where racial politics and aesthetics intersect, reflecting shifts from hegemonic assimilation pressures to political resistance and back again. Historically, black hair was subjected to binary judgments of good hair versus bad hair based on how closely it approximated straight European hair, leading to widespread chemical straightening practices. Madam C.J. Walker became a prominent millionaire in the early twentieth century after inventing and marketing conditioning hair care products for African Americans, having previously worked as a launderer and cook across her 1867-1919 lifespan. Activism in the 1960s challenged these norms by popularizing natural hairstyles like the Afro as symbols of political pride and self-acceptance, and 14-year-old Gloria Andrews wrote a 1969 column in Seventeen magazine about the meaning of the Afro.

Legal institutions often fail to recognize the intersectionality of race and gender, mistakenly interpreting mutable cultural grooming practices as strictly separate from immutable biological characteristics. In the 1981 court case Rogers v. American Airlines, a black female flight attendant challenged a ban on braided hairstyles as racial and gender discrimination, but the court dismissed her claim by ruling that the anti-braid policy was an even-handed regulation of a mutable cultural practice rather than an immutable biological trait.

Religious Rearticulations

Ethnicity functions as a more open and inclusive subject position than race, enabling groups to articulate cultural uniqueness and a sense of belonging-in-difference through traditional dress and shared heritage. Mexican painter Frida Kahlo adapted indigenous Tehuana ethnic dress from the Tehuantepec region to articulate an anticolonialist and nationalist identity while navigating complex gender and sexual subject positions across her 1907-1954 lifespan.

Religion intersects deeply with ethnic and national identities, serving both as a mechanism of social control over the body and as a vehicle for cultural preservation and transnational modern faith-based fashion. In a field study of a Gábor Romani community in Romania, Saba Tesfay described how men adopted broad-brimmed hats from Jewish traders while maintaining distinct customary waistcoats, whereas Gábor Adventist women faced strict dress regulations prohibiting large gold earrings and requiring specific pleated skirts and aprons. European orientalism historically romanticized and appropriated Middle Eastern textile head coverings, creating a persistent dichotomy between runway fashion trends and cultural or religious anxieties. In 1911, French fashion designer Paul Poiret hosted The Thousand and Second Night party where guests were required to wear Arabian Nights-inspired harem pants and turbans, a style later echoed by Hollywood starlets and modern fashion runways.

5. Class and Status Dynamics

Max Weber distinguished between economic class based on production and status groups based on consumption styles. While economic class is tied to the acquisition of goods, status groups are stratified by the principles of their consumption and special lifestyles. Pierre Bourdieu demonstrated that social class is embodied through cultural capital and habitus, encompassing taste, posture, and everyday grooming rather than just purchasing power. Habitus refers to the natural bodily demeanor learned as a member of a specific family or class, which translates into how individuals carry and present themselves.

Social class is embodied through cultural capital and habitus, where individuals navigate status claims and demurrals across historical and modern landscapes.

Fashion studies and sociology use six distinct metaphors to decipher class dynamics, revealing the contradictions in social structures:

• pyramid metaphor;
• binary metaphor;
• level playing field;
• social ladder;
• percolation;
• trickle across model.

Factory workers in Lowell, Massachusetts, experienced the binary industrial model where owners held production control while workers felt alienated like living machines. In 1836, a proposed 15 percent wage reduction led to a strike. Young women who migrated to work in textile mills experienced economic independence, yet they maintained traditional family thrift values. In 1841, a New England factory worker named Abby resisted buying expensive silk dresses to save money and support her family, returning home with a modest merino dress.

Class Metaphors and Cultural Capital

Historically, ruling classes enacted sumptuary laws to regulate consumption and preserve feudal hierarchies, but these laws ultimately failed. These laws sought to stop lower classes and rising merchant groups from purchasing luxury items like fine silks and furs. In Tokugawa Japan, centralized rulers used sumptuary laws from 1603 to 1868 to target the merchant class, prohibiting commoners from wearing fine silks and gold lacquer. During the T'an period from 618 to 906 C.E., similar sumptuary rules were enacted in China following earlier power consolidations between 220 and 250 C.E.

Status Claims and Demurrals

Fred Davis argues that status in style-fashion-dress involves identity ambivalences characterized by simultaneous status claims and status demurrals. Individuals often make status claims through luxury goods while simultaneously employing status demurrals to avoid looking too showy or ostentatious. A thirty-one-year-old entrepreneur avoids conspicuously branded items after a recession to remain subtle about her wealth, buying class pieces while rushing to purchase them before they sell out. A Chanel sequined tweed coat at Nordstrom cost 9010 dollars, and Christian Louboutin Bianca platform pumps cost 775 dollars.

Beau Brummell established the principle of conspicuous inconspicuousness, transforming upper-class leisure into the template for modern bourgeois masculinity. In 1799, he received an inheritance of 30000 British pounds from his father. He spent up to five hours dressing and used subtle trouser suits and cravats to define a new standard of understated masculine elegance in Regency England. Ralph Lauren built the Polo label by curating environments resembling gentlemen's clubs, constructing an ersatz old-money look that bridges middle-class aspirations and aristocratic aesthetics through town-and-country style.

6. Gendering Fashion and Masculinities

Gender is not a fixed biological essence, but a socially constructed performance enacted iteratively through style, fashion, and dress. Drawing on Judith Butler's concept of performativity, Susan B. Kaiser explains that everyday grooming, clothing, and body modifications map out gendered subject positions in interaction with cultural discourses.

Gender is an iterative performance and soft assemblage that challenges binary oppositions through diverse historical and transnational masculinities.

Infant boys and girls in the early nineteenth century both wore long white dresses, showing how infant clothing coding varies radically across history. Clothing historian Jo Paoletti documented that in 1918, a magazine advised parents that pink was a more robust and masculine color, while blue was delicate and feminine.

Biological sex is not a static destiny, but is softly assembled in a complex articulation with time, psychology, culture, and dress. Biologist Anne Fausto-Sterling points out that biological traits exist on a continuum and are co-constructed alongside social and cultural factors rather than being strictly hardwired. Approximately two percent of infants are born with genitalia or characteristics varying from medically defined ideals, and some receive early corrective surgeries.

Performativity and Soft Assemblages

Euromodernity fostered a masculine renunciation of fashion, branding true masculinity as serious, dark, and unmarked by excessive ornamentation. Middle-class bourgeois men abandoned brightly colored silks, lace, and wigs in favor of somber, tailored business suits, associating overt fashion with feminine frivolity. In 2011, J. Crew creative director Jenna Lyons faced criticism from commentators for featuring her son Beckett with bright pink toenails in an email newsletter.

Transgender studies and cross-dressing practices disrupt the euromodern binary by treating gender as a fluid movement across boundaries. Scholar Susan Stryker defines transgender as movement across socially imposed boundaries, encompassing transsexuality, cross-dressing, and third-gender systems. Christine Jorgensen returned to the United States in 1952 after undergoing hormonal treatments and sex reassignment surgeries in Denmark, sparking massive media attention.

Masculinities and Resistance

Marginalized young men used exaggerated zoot suits during the 1940s to signal ethnic pride and resist hegemonic masculinity. African American, Mexican American, and Filipino jazz subcultures adopted the zoot suit—featuring long coats, padded shoulders, and full pegged trousers—flouting wartime fabric rationing. In June 1943, anti-zoot suit riots erupted in Los Angeles as servicemen ambushed zoot suiters and stripped them of their clothes in the streets.

The Congolese La SAPE movement uses high-end designer clothing as a strategy of colonial ambivalence and self-definition. Originating in the 1930s in the former French colony of the Congo, sapeurs acquire designer garments from Paris and local sources to express elegance, dignity, and transnational identity. Sapeurs in Kinshasa, such as Guy Matondo and Yannick Kindingo, create unique masculine statements by combining bright colors, plaids, and Japanese designer pieces like Issey Miyake.

7. Sexuality and Queer Aesthetics

Sexuality operates through the theater of the imagination, transitioning from medicalized pathologization to queer drag, camp, and intersectional inclusivity.

Human sexuality functions as a complex theater of the imagination and the body, driven by emotions and fantasies rather than simple biological instincts. Marjorie Garber proposes that sexuality and desire should be viewed continuously without binary edges through a Möbius strip model. This perspective highlights how fashioned bodies circulate as sexual signs.

Medicalization and Homophobic Discourse

Late nineteenth-century scientific discourse constructed homosexuality as a pathological gender inversion, equating sexual desire with gender non-conformity. In 1888, sexologists coined the terms homosexuality and heterosexuality. Havelock Ellis reported case studies of male inverts who focused vainly on their looks and preferred green, and female inverts who enjoyed wearing men's clothing.

Dr. Mary Edwards Walker (1832-1919) wore the short dress and pantaloons of the feminist dress reform movement and was awarded the medal of honor by President Andrew Jackson. In 1902, a medical journal called her the most distinguished sexual invert in the United States. In the 1890s in England, Oscar Wilde was put on trial, convicted, and vilified in the press for gross indecency with other male persons. Between 1933 and 1945, an estimated 100,000 gay men were arrested, and 10,000 were sent to concentration camps where they wore pink triangles.

Drag, Camp, and Intersectionality

Drag and camp use irony, drama, and humor to reveal that gender is not a biological essence but a performance that must be continually constructed. In New York in the 1920s and 1930s, drag balls offered a vehicle for African American and Latino working-class gay men and transgender individuals to cross-dress, a tradition chronicled in Jennie Livingston's 1990 documentary Paris Is Burning.

In 2005, the group And Castro For All picketed a popular gay bar in San Francisco's Castro District after African American men in Afrocentric or hip hop attire faced selective screening.

8. Time, Space, and Place

Globalization and digital technologies compress time and space together like Möbius strips, increasing the significance of place while blurring national boundaries. David Harvey and other theorists argue that fast-flowing money and goods threaten place, yet globalization ironically creates new opportunities to articulate local and national identities. Digital design and communication technologies flatten traditional manufacturing routes, allowing fashion to emerge outside traditional western urban centers.

Time-space compression and local places intersect with age, generation, and soft assemblages to dissolve rigid historical binaries.

The Norwegian clothing company Moods of Norway, founded by Simen Stallnacke and Peder Børresen in Stryn, uses a hot pink tractor logo and rural landscapes on its website to blend local folk representations with transnational distribution. The headquarters sits in a population of 6750 in Stryn, Norway, and celebrated 6 years of operation on the international fashion dance floor.

Time-Space Compression

Modern Western thought constructs false binary oppositions that place time as dynamic history while relegating space and non-Western cultures to a static past. Feminist geographer Doreen Massey argues that philosophical binary thinking creates a geometry of power where space plays second fiddle to time.

Shanghai Tang, founded by David Tang in 1994, used a nostalgic, self-orientalizing approach based on 1830s historical inspiration and 1930s Shanghai to offer bespoke tailoring and custom cheongsams, revitalizing Chinese modernity rather than leaving it in the past.

Age, Generation, and Place

Age and generation locate different life stages while moving through time with a cohort, whereas place represents geographical positioning invested with meaning through power dynamics. These subjective experiences are softly assembled and reflect cultural discourses rather than clean decade boundaries.

The author reflects on a 1959 family photograph in San Antonio, Texas, capturing the baby boom generation born from 1946 to 1964.

10 Key Ideas

1. Studying fashion requires a both/and perspective and the circuit of style-fashion-dress model to navigate complex cultural flows.
2. Fashion is a transnational phenomenon rooted in intersectional subject positions and the material negotiation of ambiguity.
3. National identities are imagined communities expressed through gendered clothing, historical mapping, and globalized production networks.
4. Race, ethnicity, and religion function as dynamic subject positions that intersect with hair politics, legal frameworks, and transnational faith fashion.
5. Social class is embodied through cultural capital and habitus, where individuals navigate status claims and demurrals across historical and modern landscapes.
6. Gender is an iterative performance and soft assemblage that challenges binary oppositions through diverse historical and transnational masculinities.
7. Sexuality operates through the theater of the imagination, transitioning from medicalized pathologization to queer drag, camp, and intersectional inclusivity.
8. Time-space compression and local places intersect with age, generation, and soft assemblages to dissolve rigid historical binaries.