Hazel Clark

SLOW + FASHION—an Oxymoron—or a Promise for the Future …?

Abstract Conceptually, the slow food movement provides the point of departure for this article, which asks if the slow approach can offer a sustainable solution for fashion. Three “lines of reflection” are addressed: the valuing of local resources and distributed economies; transparent production systems with less intermediation between producer and consumer; and sustainable and sensorial products that have a longer usable life and are more highly valued than typical “consumables.” Each is investigated using examples that together address the possible global dominance of fast fashion, provide more sustainable ways of approaching fashion, and concentrate on the implication of fashion as actual material garments, which are used and discarded. The approaches mentioned simultaneously challenge existing hierarchies of designer, producer, and consumer; question the notion of fashion being concerned exclusively with the new; confront fashions reliance on image; present fashion as a choice rather than as a mandate; and highlight collaborative/cooperative work—providing agency especially to women.

Culture-Based Knowledge Towards New Design Thinking and Practice—A Dialogue

For the benefit of the reader, it should be explained that this paper is presented as a dialogue to represent our ongoing conversations. In effect, the dialogue began in 1999 when we constructed a new course for the MA in Design the students at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, which explored the potential of designing from the basis of cultural knowledge and understanding. Benny Ding Leong, a Hong Kong-based designer, had been using this concept in his teaching of product design to undergraduate students, as well as in his own work. The strategy is in the process of refinement and the directions chosen are inevitably selective, but the potential it offers could be significant, not merely for Hong Kong and China, but on a much wider scale.

WP 2010-2 After T-Bills and T-Shirts: China’s Role in “High” and “Low” Fashion after the Global Economic Crisis

This paper analyzes the role of fashion design in Chinese industrial development in light of the structural changes brought on by the global economic crisis. The Chinese textile and apparel sector will rely less on exports to the US and EU and more on the domestic market. We analyze the capacity of Chinese fashion designers to shift their focus, from global brands to a distinctive Chinese look, with appeal at domestic Chinese markets for low, medium, and high fashion.

Chinese Fashion Designers: Questions of Ethnicity and Place in the Twenty-First Century

Abstract As Asian-American fashion designers have become better known in the USA and globally the media has highlighted their achievements collectively. What, this article asks, are the implications of second- and third-generation Asian-Americans having attracted such attention? If new, young fashion designers are being identified on the basis of their ethnicity how might they enter into or negotiate a position within a larger global fashion world, and what impact might this have on the identification of other Asian designers, not least those from mainland China, whose work is little known in the West? The argument is framed by the concept of habitus, seen from two perspectives, one the significance of place in the global fashion industry, and the other related to the discourse of “ethnicity” that surrounds the designers. Examples are discussed of Asian-American and mainland Chinese fashion designers whose work has become known more widely through the press, exhibitions, and commercial activity. We are, it is suggested, at a point of transition regarding the wider knowledge and reception of Chinese fashion designers.

Exhibition Review: Japan Fashion Now

Hazel Clark is Research Chair of Fashion at Parsons the New School for Design, New York. Her publications include, the collaborative: Old Clothes, New Looks: Second Hand Fashion; The Fabric of Cultures: Fashion, Identity, and Globalization; Design Studies: A Reader; Fashion and Everyday Life: Britain and America, 1890–2010 (forthcoming). clarkh@newschool.edu Museum of the Fashion Institute of Technology, New York, September 17, 2010–April 2, 2011