Editors:Dr. Anne Peirson-Smith, The City University of Hong Kong Dr. Joseph H. Hancock II, Drexel University

This issue of Fashion, Style & Popular Culture takes a pop cultural approach when examining innovative methods of fashion branding. Branding is an umbrella term for marketing, as branding encompasses more than just advertising media, but also the context of companies, performance, merchandise, design, consumers and most importantly, the stakeholders associated with the brand. Fashion branding has been defined as the cumulative image approach targeting customers with products, advertising and promotion organized around a coherent image as a way of encouraging the purchase and the repurchase of consumer goods from the same company. While historically, fashion branding has primarily focused on consumption and purchasing decisions, recent scholarship now challenges old methods suggesting that branding is a cultural process that needs to be analyzed from a pop cultural view using critical, ethnographic, individualistic, or interpretive methods exploring the meaning behind branding and how it is shaping the ways view fashion and style. This line of enquiry situates the process of fashion branding in the context of the contested power relations underpinning the production, marketing and consumption of fashion. Authors are invited to submit papers that examine:
◊ Global, transglobal as well as local niche popular and cultural branded fashion design strategies.
◊ How branding influences fashion design, through notions of the production process or proximity to the brand image and brand values. Does the branded image overshadow the final fashion design?
◊ How various branding strategies are encouraged for example: “going green,” mass customization, DIY and online shopping, and other fashion design related practices that have generated new motivations for consumers to purchase fashion.
◊ How the fashion branding industry utilizes popular culture as a means of engagement with target demographic groups.
◊ How media branding communicates both visual and verbal symbols in fashion generating new cultural and aesthetic variations in the ways consumers perceive clothing styles.
◊ Examination of new hypermodern constructs of individual fashion forms and styles that consumers are creating based upon the idea of ‘personal branding’.
◊ How consumers actively and creatively re-appropriate fashion brands as a site of sociocultural resistance.
◊ Critical analysis of various genres of brand strategies and tactics from luxury to high street fashion brands.
◊ Any other studies related to fashion branding and popular culture.

Manuscripts should be approximately 5000 words and prepared using Intellect Journal House Style which may be accessed at: http://www.intellectbooks.co.uk/MediaManager/File/Intellect%20style%20 guide.pdf.

Deadline for Submissions: January 1, 2013

Please send manuscripts to: Joseph Hancock at: jhh33@drexel.edu or Anne Peirson-Smith at ENANNEPS@cityu.edu.hk

For questions regarding submissions or inquiries regarding the journal, Fashion, Style & Popular Culture, please contact Principal Editor, Joseph Hancock: Jhh33@drexel.edu www.intellectbooks.com