Keyword

On Shame

Little Doubts Everywhere

Prose

Little Doubts Everywhere

by

In the 21st century ‘little doubts’ have entered the field of fashion at its core: from doubts about the necessity of the fast-paced rhythm of fashion to doubts about the sustainability of its production models. Yet none of these little doubts challenges the actual paradigm of the fashion system, rooted as it is in the temporal dynamic of rejection (advancedness and backwardness) mirrored by the fashion system in all kinds of ways: body types, skin colour, social class. So where might the paradigm-level change in the fashion system come from?

READ MORE

Dressed up and Laying Bare

Prose

Dressed up and Laying Bare

Fashion in the Shadow of the Market

by

In a plane of crisp sunlight that angles down through the door frame, and dissolves into rust-coloured shadows settling across the dark floor, unease spreads along the walls of this wooden interior. A woman in the centre hugs a small infant close to her breast. Next to her, another holds a child on her lap. To their left is a muscular man dressed in light yellow work trousers and a waistcoat: he watches them, his face expressively surly. Seated in a semi-circle the women stare intently at the stove, or let their eyes settle on something outside the room. They are dressed well in respectable printed cotton dresses, their sleeves billowing out from under stiff white aprons. Four white men – one in the background and the other three conversing in the doorway on the left – like sentinels, stand watch. And as they watch and we watch them, these slaves, neatly arranged on rough wooden benches, quietly wait to be sold.

READ MORE

Fashion and the Fleshy Body

Prose

Fashion and the Fleshy Body

On Dress as an Embodied Practice

by

Individuals feel a social and moral imperative to perform their identity in particular ways, and this includes learning appropriate ways of dressing. Like so much bodily behaviour, codes of dress come to be taken for granted and are routinely and unreflexively employed. But not only does dress form the key link between individual identity and the body, providing the means, or ‘raw material,’ for performing identity; dress is fundamentally an inter-subjective and social phenomenon, it is an important link between individual identity and social belonging. Dress works to ‘glue’ identities in a world where they are uncertain. Dressed inappropriately for a situation we feel vulnerable and embarrassed, and so too when our dress ‘fails’ us, when in public we find we’ve lost a button or stained our clothes, or find our fly undone. However, the embarrassment of such mistakes of dress is not simply that of a personal faux pas, but the shame of failing to meet the standards required of one by the moral order of the social space.

READ MORE

Docile Bodies

Prose

Docile Bodies

Prison Uniforms and the Dress of Subservience

by

Prison literature and theory often focuses on the oppressiveness of the system, the callous discipline enforced on the prisoner, the strict rules which often seem arbitrary in their focus and the often patronising attitude of the authorities. We often assume that prison is an environment so infused with control and discipline that the inmates have no choice but to bow to the authorities. This is of course not the case. Prison life is full of upturned collars and resentful squints, as well as a myriad of other ways to subvert the rules, however slightly.

READ MORE

Mirror

Fiction

Mirror

by

The really nasty ones, the killers, the rapists, the child killers and child rapists; the ones who have been held in custody, denied bail, too dangerous to release, flight risk, suicide risk; they arrive in prison vans. They’re tricky, the vans. The toughened plastic windows are tinted, and we all hold up our cameras and take shot after shot anyway, but almost all of the time the results are useless. Nothing but close-ups of a black plastic window.

READ MORE

Carrie

Fiction

Carrie

Excerpt from Stephen King’s Horror Paperback

by

“Take it off, Carrie. We’ll go down and burn it in the incinerator together, and then pray for for­giveness. We’ll do penance.” Her eyes began to sparkle with the strange, disconnected zeal that came over her at events which she considered to be tests of faith. “I’ll stay home from work and you’ll stay home from school. We’ll pray. We’ll ask for a Sign. We’ll get us down on our knees and ask for the Pentecostal Fire.”

READ MORE