Viscose

Viscose 07 examines scent through a variety of lenses, observing its historical and contemporary role in fashion culture. The issue seeks out histories of projects—mainly developed with or by artists and designers—who have embraced and involved smell as a medium of possibility and knowledge production, gesturing to histories of manufacturing, trade, branding, and commerce, but also sexuality, desire, identity, and memory. With respect to the abstract knowledge of scent, we are in pursuit of accounts ranging from literature to philosophy that attempt to synthesize, much like perfume itself, the sensorial, capitalist, artistic, and scientific forces that make up scent in our modern world. 

The sixth issue of Viscose Journal focuses on fashion as constructed through words, language and writing. From the pens of fashion journalists and art critics to the conceptual wordplay of designers, the issue delves into the aesthetic and critical effects of "writing fashion” in and outside of fashion industries.

The fashion writer is a confidant, a storyteller, a forecaster, a mythmaker; they are evocative and poetic, forming words that shape, and in turn are shaped by, the latest fashions. From the salon shows to the pages of fashion magazines, their “expressions may be as ephemeral as the fashions they describe,” as Dorothy Hughes noted already in 1935. Early fashion writing played a key role in the transformation of clothes into fashion each season, and in igniting the machine of fashion itself. The historical roots of fashion writing— which was, at least in an industry context, a distinctly female practice— are grounded in the modernization and seasonalization of industrial fashion. And even today, in an age described by many as image-driven, this remains true: across various media platforms, language not only surrounds fashion but also continuously contributes to its creation.

The succinct, ephemeral poetry of the fashion writer still plays—nearly a century since Hughes’ observation—a transformative role in the seasonal turnover of fashion, but its role in the fashion industry remains seriously overlooked. Fashion invests substantially in seasonally refreshing the visual messaging accompanying its physical commodities, but language plays a similarly important support in this artful game of marketing. In this industrial context spanning from press releases to magazine production, writing is devoted to fashion promotion, prioritizing its fundamental traits of novelty, urgency, and semiotic complexity. In this context, fashion writing is a process of mystification, capable of revealing things that the image cannot. The material conditions of fashion writing—of being for fashion—generates a unique set of poetics and syntax. Fashion writing, or “written fashion,” as Roland Barthes asserts, is a form of signification that is simultaneously real and imaginary, connected to the real garment that it signifies, but largely unencumbered by its materiality. Given the constraints of economic, cultural, and political factors on fashion writing, it is perhaps more interesting to ask, what is fashion writing really encumbered by, and what would it mean to “unencumber” it?

Since Baudelaire, art critics have turned to fashion as source material for their practice, casting fashion in the role of art’s capitalist conspirator, temporal truth-sayer, or feminine alter-ego. This erratic history is one filled with both fraught politics (rooted in a gendered division of labor) as well as critical possibility: art writing gestures to a style of intellectualism and independence from industry that is largely foreign in fashion. Viscose Journal has, since its founding, aimed to detach fashion criticism from industrial frameworks that has historically premised it. At the same time, informed by a materialist politics of fashion labor, we wish to seriously level the largely female writing of commercial fashion publications with the masculine philosophical inquiries of fashion.

While "fashion writing" denotes a thematic category within the wider field of writing, our theme of "writing fashion" prompts an exploration of fashion writing as a mode of fashion production and critique. This issue aims to explore writing as a tool for shaping fashion and broaden its perspectives by presenting a survey of experimental, fictocritical, and poetic approaches to writing fashion. In this expanded field of writing, “fashion” unfolds as a ubiquitous and epistemologically complex phenomena of everyday life pertinent to all.

The fifth issue of Viscose explores fashion’s multifaceted retail spaces and cultures. With the evolution of shopping in the 20th and 21st centuries as its focus, the issue looks at the shop as a central nexus where communities and identities are continuously produced and re-imagined through commerce. With a special attention to the role of fashion retail within urban spatial politics, we seek out histories of projects—often developed with or by artists—that have embraced the shop as a medium of both possibility and contestation. 

Retail is a central site of fashion production. It is in the store, mall, and e-shop that fashion products reveal the extent of the libidinal capitalist economy—a desire that has been theorized for centuries as commodity fetishism, a magical power relegated to objects as they enter circuits of exchange. As such, the shop is a stage for fashion’s oldest rituals, one that has become synonymous with capitalist modernity. Over the last century, shopping spaces have accelerated and mutated, into malls and department stores, re-imagining new types of public spaces structured by increasingly sublime architectures of consumption. As a public activity that demands (and thus commands) physical space, shopping continues to produce social relations that are deeply political in nature: gender, class, gentrification, surveillance, and police power are all ambiently produced and reproduced within retail spaces. As spaces dedicated to the reproduction of capital, retail necessitates systems, both formal and informal, of loss prevention and security that are embedded in physical infrastructure and embodied within consumers. As such, retail can be understood as sites of political contestation, transgression, and resistance, however quotidian or slight they may seem. 

We are studying retail in the aftermath of various proclaimed crises and revolutions—store death, retail apocalypse, digitization. Yet through these times, brick-and-mortar fashion consumption has not died but instead morphed in both appearance and function, serving today as sophisticated branding spaces in an aggressive experience economy. Retail, as we see it and know it in our contemporary moment, manically negotiates the ever-shifting relationship between contrasting spaces—urban, rural, virtual, invisible—and often prototypes infrastructures that are then adopted elsewhere in society. 

ISSUE 4 - "TRANS" . This special issue of Viscose critically explores the numerous relationships between transness and fashion. The issue sets out to ask two ambivalent questions: what is a fashion theory of transness, and what might a trans theory of fashion be? Viscose 04 productively confronts fashion studies with trans aesthetics and trans studies, and attempts to excavate the largely invisible archives of trans history that form the underside of fashion itself. The issue features contributions by a global cast of trans and queer writers, artists, and creatives, responding to the porous notion of "trans cultural production" as a genre full of potentiality. The issue features a wealth of archival and contemporary moments of trans fashion production spanning 50 years. The cover celebrates histories of independent queer publishing, and doubles as a detachable poster.

ISSUE 3  – “ASIAS” . This special third issue, co-edited with London-based writer and director Cheuk NG, and designed by Shanghai-based echocatcher, sets out to deconstruct the notion of “Asias” through fashion. With an emphasis on the term’s plural possibilities, the issue seeks out stories deep within fashion’s global supply chain, and reflects on the porous communities of fashion producers and consumers around the world that may self-identify as “Asian.”

Focusing on the regions bordering the South China Sea, with contributors from over 10 countries as well as their global diasporas, the issue contests the idea of Asia as a singular idea, image, and even place, instead engendering an array of “Asias” that are employed symbolically, economically, socially, and politically across fashion’s frenzied systems.

Viscose 3 is produced with a determined and self-conscious pluralism, offering no one direction but rather accounting for the breadth of ingenious responses to ever-fickle questions such as origin, community, ownership, symbolism, appropriation, and diaspora, and the treacherous yet thrilling ways these overlap in and as style.