The editor invites essays for a book which explores the relationship(s) between identity, display, space, and fashion. Recently, we have witnessed the global expansion of more spectacular and grandeur designer boutiques with designers collaborating with famed architects to become cutting-edge places of innovation and spectacle, while numerous exhibitions and institutions have lent their spaces to explore the visual and material cultures of fashion. Never before has fashion played such a pivotal role in the cultural, social, and private lives of some many. Yet the spaces and places which allow all this to take place remain obscured functioning simply as backdrops when in fact they are pivotal to the creation of meaning and the very notion and function of display. While there is a rich and significant body of work which has interrogated the practices of shopping and fashion as object of consumption, critical attention has viewed the places and spaces of fashion simply in terms of capitalism and consumer culture obliterating the myriad nuanced layers involved. In addition, more recently, much has been made of the connections, metaphorical or otherwise, between fashion and architecture, paying little attention to the material and visual connections, objects and bodies interacting in and negotiating the spaces of fashion. In other words, attention has been paid to the surface/flesh/fabric of fashion and architecture, and little to the depth/interior/insides of these places and spaces. This volume hopes to explore the display of fashion as a site of spectacle, desire, pleasure, identity, and performance. In sum, what we are discussing here is the topography and spatial representations of fashion.

The editor invites papers both historical and theoretical which address either or all of the following central core themes: