This new edited collection assembles academic essays and intellectual activism equally next to visual essays and artistic interventions and proposes a different concept for fashion research that eschews the traditional logic of academic fashion studies. It features acclaimed designers, artists, curators and theorists whose work investigates the multi-faceted debates on the rise of practice-based research in fashion. The book sets out to explore current issues in fashion research with a particular focus on both methodology and expansion of the field to encompass overlooked voices and narratives. It has a particular concern with the relationships between theory and practice and with how knowledge is created and disseminated in fashion studies. It is an excellent and really valuable contribution to the field at a point both when fashion studies is expanding and when the fashion industry is at a crucial point of change. Some of the contributions were originally presented at a symposium hosted by the Austrian Center for Fashion Research ‘TALKSHOW: The politics of practice-based fashion research’ at Vienna’s Museum of Applied Arts, curated by Wally Salner. The symposium brought together a group of fashion scholars, designers, educators and practitioners to explore critical contemporary fashion (research) practices, and to investigate critical fashion knowledge between theory and practice, beyond assumed disciplinary and epistemological boundaries. Many contributions in this volume were initially presented at that symposium, while others are testimonies of international debates that were part of the research activities of the Austrian Center for Fashion Research, a research project funded by the Austrian Federal Ministry of Science Research and Economy, led by Elke Gaugele. The book is structured into three sections: Fashion Knowledge, Practice-Based Fashion Research, and Sites of Fashion and Politics. Contributions look at new forms of fashion knowledge that are forming with and along shifting fashion practices, practice-based fashion research, and sheds light on different sites and entanglements of fashion and politics in distinctive contemporary and historical moments of de/colonization, anti/racism, and anti/globalization. Elke Gaugele is cultural anthropologist and professor of fashion, styles and contextual design at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, Austria. Monica Titton is a sociologist, fashion theorist and senior scientist at the fashion design department of the University of Applied Arts Vienna, Austria. Other contributions are from Elke Bippus, Astrid Engl, Jojo Gronostay, Ruby Hoette, Bianca Koczan, Priska Morger, NCCFN, Wally Salner, Andreas Spiegl, José Teunissen, Lara Torres, Carol Tulloch and Maria Ziegelböck Readers will be academics, practitioners, designers, artists, curators, museums, theoretical scholars, lecturers, practice-based researchers, students and practitioners at all levels in the fields of fashion, textile, art and design. This new book with its original focus on practice-based research will be useful for a general and academic readership alike, and to all those working within the field of fashion studies, including those with a theoretical focus, fashion practitioners and those working within innovative pockets of the fashion industry. 

Der Einfuhrungsband zu Kultur- und Sozialtheorien im Kunstfeld bildet den 'State of the Art' gegenwartiger Kunstausbildung in seiner transdisziplinaren und methodologischen Vielfalt ab. Die disziplinare Palette reicht dabei von traditionsreichen Fachern wie Philosophie und Kunstgeschichte uber Kultur- und Kunstsoziologie, Architektur- und Medientheorie, bis hin zu den Studies der Gegenwart: Queer Studies, Visual Studies, Transcultural Studies, Fashion Studies u.a. Daruber hinaus werden facherubergreifende theoretische Ansatze und angewandte Praxisfelder vorgestellt.

Advertising creates dream worlds, yet always simultaneously bears witness to its era. Both these tendencies are exemplified in fashion posters. Moving beyond the latest modish trends and beauty ideals, fashion posters reflect moral codes and social conditions. In particular, they pander to the longing to escape routine everyday life, for these posters suggest that it is possible to attain a completely new identity simply by opting for a different garment or style. Androgynous models and less normative images of men and women in the advertising industry mark the dawn of a new era that entails constantly balancing aspirations to individuality against a sense of collective belonging. Fashion posters from past and present are lifestyle propositions; they tell stories, seduce and shock. Playing with convention and provocation, bodies are sometimes lavishly veiled and disguised, sometimes sensually staged. At times consumers are only indirectly encouraged to shop. A button or a coat collar as a pars pro toto illustrate product quality in historical posters. A new, somewhat controversial approach to fashion advertising emerges in Benetton campaigns from the early 1990s. Overtly erotic ostentation contrasts with poetic allusions that are for example the hallmark of highly aesthetic Japanese fashion posters. En Vogue brings together fashion advertising spanning roughly a hundred years and deploying myriad different PR strategies, in each case reflecting the cultures and periods in which it was created.