Contributors to this special issue explore the long global history of fashion, tracing its movement across cultural, national, and political borders. "Fashion," write the editors in their introduction, "is the cultural medium through which borders shift and move—in which place can be understood as a state of mind or a geographic location." Topics include wartime capitalism as captured in Mollie Panter-Downes's "Letter from London," the significance of Emily Dickinson's multicolored woolen shawl, an examination of social privilege and liberal humanism through the writings of E. M. Forster, Afro-Brazilian fashion in Candomblé, and a critique of the global clothing chain through Christine Duvergé’s The Lives of Loréna (Les Vies de Loréna). Through their research, the authors examine fashion's articulations of the relation among the local, the national, and the global, as well as the human experience of interacting with the fashion industry in one national context while living in a globalized world.
Contributors: Ria Banerjee, Heidi Brevik-Zender, Melissa Dinsman, Rhonda Garelick, Jane Garrity, Nan Goodman, Jan Grue, Rawan Maki, Celia Marshik, David T. Mitchell, Aymê Okasaki, Marylaura Papalas, Ann Rea, Lise Shapiro Sanders
