Locational Fashion Cultures

This article employs a methodology of locational fashion cultures, which is still under-defined and under-utilized in Fashion Studies, from the interdisciplinary intersections of cultural analysis, cultural history, cultural and media representations of fashion in urban contexts, to help us understand fashion beyond its economic value and systems. As case studies and examples of this methodology, this article outlines four books from my Urban Chic book series (published by Intellect) that examine Berlin, Vienna, Montreal, and Copenhagen cultures through the lens of fashion. The cities in these books are not often considered canonical fashion capitals like Paris, London, and New York, but each has unique and vibrant fashion cultures. By examining their respective fashion cultures, we can investigate the ways in which fashion can be re-inscribed with cultural values independent from its material or trend-driven obsolescence. The article also provides a summary of the various ways in which fashion cultures and fashion cities have been defined and described by fashion scholars to date. It concludes with some suggestions and questions that may be posed in order to analyze and highlight locational fashion cultures.