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Decolonial scholars call for fashion definitions and perspectives from all cultures, and this article responds to these requests. Numerous theories and positions have inspired and shaped this conceptual model, including valuable insight from First Nations scholars who have explored fashion theories that integrate First Nations philosophies and ontologies. This First Nations fashion, art and style conceptual model explores the practice and outlines the themes of Culture, Expression, and Self-determination. First Nations fashion, art and style, as a term, acknowledges the holistic practice and industry, which includes fashion design, style, and the intersection of art via textiles and garments. The Cultural element within the model explores the continuation of cultural practice through design and dress and how it can contribute to cultural well-being. The Expression element describes contemporary cultural and intersectional identity forms through traditional and modern garments. The Self-determination component explores the autonomy of First Nations fashion practices and how First Nations people self-determine their fashion brands via cultural, financial, and environmental sustainability. This article concludes with recommendations for further theoretical and empirical research on First Nations fashion, art and style. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The introduction of the Australian Modern Slavery Act in 2018 has important implications for the fashion sector and the supply chains that it furnishes. However, it also introduces an added layer of complexity to the already crowded space of ethical fashion information. This article investigates how fashion consumers navigate the increasingly complex landscape of ethical fashion against the backdrop of new legislation and alongside the moral imperatives and pressures of environmental media. Research into sustainable fashion often suggests that more reporting, more transparency, more information is necessary in order to educate consumers about ethical options. However, our survey and interview data illustrate that even the most informed and knowledgeable consumers find it difficult to navigate the information that is available, often becoming overwhelmed when it comes to buying ethically. Taking seriously the competing demands driving ethical consumption, we argue that understanding how the mechanisms of failure operate in the ethical fashion landscape, particularly feelings of shame and guilt, can give us greater knowledge of fashion consumer attitudes and practices. This, in turn, may lead to a better awareness of the needs of conscious consumers as well as the limits of ethical fashion. We advocate for an acknowledgment of consumer imperfection to shift away from pathologizing the consumer or the commodity itself and to focus instead on the consumer's thwarted relationship with the means of production and the complicated global networks of engagement that inform ethical consumption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Chinese and broader Asian electorate in Australia has been historically fragmented. However, in the 2022 election Chinese Australian voters played a significant role in the defeat of Scott Morrison’s Coalition as they swung toward Labor and independents in several constituencies. This occurred in the greater Sydney area, such as in Reid and Bennelong, as well as in Melbourne’s Chisholm and Perth’s Tangney. This article investigates Chinese Australians’ voting patterns in the 2022 election. It argues that Chinese Australian voters, like many Australians, were concerned about Morrison’s personal style and attitudes toward climate change. In this election Chinese Australians shared additional displeasure over the Morrison government’s approach towards the Australia–China relationship and the changing Pacific strategic environment. Nevertheless, these attitudes do not suggest that Chinese Australian voters represent a monolithic voting bloc in the Australian electorate. There are diverse dynamics that have been manifested in Chinese Australian communities’ attitudes towards key election issues, from local government to foreign policy. While Chinese Australians favoured Labor’s overall multicultural and more inclusive approach, it may be too simplistic to generalise that the Chinese Australian electorate can be characterised as a traditional ‘ethnic vote’ in which ethnic communities are heavily influenced by issues related to their countries of origin and culture rather than their duties as Australian citizens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From innovations such as virtual fit through 3D body scanning, smart clothes, wearable technology and virtual styling assistants to more mundane capabilities such as digital photography and social media, deciding what to wear and how to wear an item is now accompanied by a range of new information and perspectives. This article examines the sociotechnical systems that support everyday decisions about what to wear, and how this decision-making process is being re-imagined in response to technology. Drawing upon closet ethnographies with women in the USA and Australia, we focus upon the ways in which women make decisions about what will help them to 'look professional'. Specifically, we attend to two key dimensions of the decision-making process – visions and validations – to understand the ways in which women weigh the opinion of other people, media and technologies, and the real and imagined role of how new technologies such as the Amazon Echo Look may be integrated into this process. Through fine-grained analysis of the ways that women receive, reject or ignore information about their performance of looking professional, we reflect upon the relative importance of different technologies in the process of decision-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

COVID‐19 has impacted a range of industries, of which the fashion industry is no exception. Here, we examine the effects of COVID‐19 on the geographies of that industry in Australia. We use a path‐dependency framework to understand the evolution of the Australian fashion industry and to evaluate the impact of COVID‐19 as an external shock to this evolution. The Australian fashion industry has been hit particularly hard by the pandemic. Drawing upon a qualitative methodology and associated set of methods consisting of 24 semi‐structured interviews with key industry actors, we explore three key themes. First, we examine the impact of COVID‐19 on firm dynamics, investigating how fashion brands have navigated a period of significant uncertainty through a combination of highly nimble internal business practices and industry collaborations. Second, in light of unstable globalised supply chains, we consider the important role of local garment production in supporting industrial resilience. Third, we explore how changing consumption behaviours are altering the retail geographies of the Australian fashion industry in both physical and virtual spaces. Based on our analysis of preliminary results, we reflect on the suitability of an evolutionary approach in this context and outline a number of themes of future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Christian Dior's 1947 'New Look' collection has been widely examined for its influence on both haute couture and clothing styles in the 1950s. In the Australian context, Margaret Maynard examined how the New Look was marketed through the ideological positioning of women's roles in the domestic sphere. This marketing campaign was spearheaded by two business syndicates who brought a series of French Fashion Parades to Australia in the late 1940s through the 1950s. Despite the hype around the parades, just how much the fashions were adopted by the wider public has not been measured. Australians did not adopt the New Look unchanged, instead local sensibilities, climate and culture meant modification was inevitable. Through examining home-sewing patterns, photographs of key cultural events and images from popular magazines from the period, this article establishes how the New Look was modified in the Australia. Results show that despite the many women who were eager to embrace the new fashion, many more were reticent, clinging in particular to the shorter hemlines they had adopted during the war years. This led to a hybrid style that both followed the French lead and suited Australian society. French designers, keen to expand their business empires through licensing, responded to these adaptions, incorporating elements into their later collections. This represented a step away from the trickle-down model. This changing dynamic gave Australian customers the confidence to demand more from the fashion designers and to adapt fashion to suit the Australian context. By examining the impact of Dior's New Look through the lens of ordinary Australian women, the influences of both the designer and his customers on the evolution of post-Second War World are exposed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between 1946 and 1974, the Australian Wool Board (AWB) increased its wool promotion in an attempt to maintain its leading role in Australia's economic development. Promotional activities of the AWB, and the screening of commercially produced newsreels and documentaries in cinemas, used fashion to foster a new value and understanding of wool. These marketing activities, mainly independent from each other, presented a unified image of wool and fashion. This article proposes that the recasting of Australian wool's cultural heritage in images of fashion parades of wool garments contributed to the continuity of its cultural tradition while integrating fashion as a modern value within national culture and identity. The article examines 14 newsreels screened in Australian cinemas between 1946 and 1974 to establish the connection between Australian national identity and wool via the reinvention of the wool narrative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the emergence of ‘business fashion’ as a new mode of male dress in 1870s Australia. The focus is on men at the vanguard of this new fashion: namely, bankers and sharebrokers in New South Wales’ gold-mining towns during a gold rush between 1871 and 1874. The rise of business dress offers us insight into the surprising extent of male interest in fashion in late-colonial Australia – and fresh perspectives on the history of Australian masculinity, class and consumption as a consequence. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Social enterprise is a growing force in the Australian economy, with great potential for local job-creation and stimulating new entrepreneurship across the service, manufacturing and retail industries. However, the sector also has a ‘dark side’ – whereby its social welfare agendas are sidelined in favour of profit-driven motives, the outsourcing of government services and perpetuation of inequalities between those that manage and those that benefit from the enterprises. In this light, it is perhaps not surprising that social enterprise literature has emerged predominantly from the field of business management, resulting in an over-representation of perspectives that privilege the economic, and technocratic, aspects of social entrepreneurship. This is particularly problematic in the context of the arts, which often challenge, transform and exceed conventional understandings of social value. This paper explores the potential role of art- and fashion-based social enterprises in contributing to sustainable community development while also activating positions of critique and political engagement from inside the mechanisms of contemporary capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Straddling the boundaries between art and fashion, a group of young avant guard Australian fashion designers burst onto the scene in the 1970s - 1980s with a blur and blaze of spectacular colours, reflecting the spirit and vibrancy of Australia. Their dazzling brightly coloured one-of-a-kind art clothes captured Australia's exuberance, its vitality and its pioneering spirit; a larrikin kind of quality that is so often inherent in the Australian character. The notion of fashion as art can be attributed to this group of visionaries who explored the broader aesthetics and expressive qualities associated with the visual arts and created a new language of fashion. Rather than following fashion trends, they consciously rejected mainstream norms, and created distinctive Australian art clothes and raised craft to the status of the fine arts. The paper examines the creative work of Australian designers Jenny Kee, Linda Jackson, Katie Pye and Jenny Bannister who created a unique vision of Australian dress that become part of Australian fashion history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the 2000s activewear has grown as a fashion category, and the tropes of gym wear – leggings, leotards and block colours – have become fashionable attire for both men and women outside the gym. This article examines the rise of activewear in the context of an on-going dialogue between fashion and sport since the beginning of the twentieth century. Through an analysis of the Australian activewear label, Lorna Jane, we consider the fashionable female body as both the object and subject of a consumer culture that increasingly overlays leisure with fashion. Activewear can be seen as the embodiment of an active and fashionable lifestyle that is achieved through a regime of self-discipline, and that symbolizes the pleasure in attaining and displaying the healthy and fit body. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the application of intellectual property law to fashion, focusing on a common law jurisdiction in Australia, the differences between the jurisdictions in terms of the accumulation of copyright and designs protection and proving ownership in copyright.

Purpose -- The purpose of this paper is to examine the challenges facing the Australian fashion industry (textile, clothing and footwear or TCF sector). Just at the point where Australian fashion has achieved international attention for its distinctive design practice, the industry is on the point of collapse. Since the 1980s, radical re-structuring aimed at reducing industry protection to encourage greater international competitiveness and innovation. Key policies have included tariff reduction, new forms of industry assistance, new manufacturing techniques, changing retail forms, and reform of employment and workplace conditions. Design/methodology/approach -- Overview of recent trends in the Australian fashion industry due to industry policies and the effects of globalization. Findings -- Severe decline in industry viability. Originality/value -- Important multifaceted analysis of the state of the industry and tracking of effects of government policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been limited research into fashion public relations. This study explores social media use in public relations in the Australian fashion industry, using ethnographic inquiry and semi-structured interviews. The findings suggest social media is transforming fashion public relations, but its adoption is uneven, with overlaps in marketing and public relations activity. Participants use social media to engage fashion publics, keep up to date with trends, monitor competitors and promote clients. Bloggers are increasingly influential. Participants perceive they must embrace social media, or risk getting left behind. The findings contribute to understanding diverse public relations practices and the ways public relations activity is transforming in response to social media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to analyse the representations and experiences of beauty amongst fat women to understand how females located outside of the normative ideal consume, express, challenge and resist "straight" beauty. Design/methodology/approach – A netnographic approach is taken to analyse 922 blog posts written by five female "fatshionistas" who play a significant role in the Australian fat activism movement. Findings – The research findings illustrate that fatshionistas (re)negotiate cultural notions of beauty through three performative acts – coming out as fat, mobilising fat citizenship and flaunting fat. Research limitations/implications – The study demonstrates how beauty is negotiated as a mode of praxis, a performance in the interaction of day-to-day life, whereby the possibilities for multiple and provisional beauties are highlighted. Practical implications – Given the active participation of those outside of the idealised form in "mainstream" beauty consumption, practitioners should make visible multiple bodily representations that are not reduced to an unhelpful construction of what is considered to be "real". Originality/value – By emphasising the lived experience of beauty as something subjective, communal and resistant, this research poses a challenge to mainstream marketing that constructs beauty as normative, singular and conformist. The paper further calls for a "queering" of the gender research agenda within marketing to better interrogate the linkages between an individual's fluid and contested identity work, consumption and marginalised or excluded status within the marketplace. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Five Australian interdisciplinary practitioners, working across fashion, craft, art and design, in Sydney and Melbourne in the 1970s-80s, shared friendships, aesthetic ideas and public presentation of their work. The ways they chose to make and disseminate their work were influenced by historically reclaimed visual conventions and craft discourses of the time, along with related circumstances of curatorship, collecting and dealing. All of this was foregrounded by contemporary interest in issues of identity and subjectivity as part of a postmodern re-orienting of 'what was what' in visual culture. The essay examines the multi-dimensional 'relationality' of these interconnections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This study investigates the nature of innovation diffusion in an agricultural context. The dominant agricultural diffusion models assume that an economically rational choice is made to adopt or reject agricultural technologies. However, recent studies of agricultural innovation highlight the ‘irrational’ and potentially ‘inefficient’ nature of the diffusion in this context. To investigate how and why agricultural technologies are adopted or rejected, we examine the diffusion of wool testing technologies in the Australian wool industry using the Bass diffusion model and Abrahamson''s diffusion and rejection typology. The results show that diffusion of agricultural innovation is not simply an efficient choice made to close observable performance gaps. The findings suggest that the adoption of inefficient innovations and the rejection of efficient innovations can be driven by an adopter''s social context, powerful external influences and imitation within an adopter group and that these drivers change over time, suggesting an evolutionary social process underlies the diffusion of agricultural technologies. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Demand for domestic tourism in Australia is in decline, particularly for young Australian travellers (YATs) who prefer to travel overseas. Although models exist to explain destination choice, many of these have limitations, including the assumption of a rational consumer and a focus on the functional attributes of travel and tourism. Further, there has been a tendency to replicate studies, albeit in different contexts, rather than search for new insights into destination choice. With the aim of better explaining the decision of destination choice by YATs, focus groups comprising representatives from the population of interest were conducted. The approach was to examine tourism from a sociological perspective, drawing on theories of ritual, ritual inversion and fashion. The results reveal the importance of self-identity and social norms in destination selection. It is concluded that destinations that contribute to enhancing one’s self-identity, particularly when they are consistent with one’s existing or aspirational social group, are more likely to be visited by YATs. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The 'black is beautiful' movement began in the United States in the early 1960s, and changed mainstream attitudes towards the body, fashion and personal aesthetics, gaining African-American people a new sense of pride in being - and being called - 'black'. In Australia the movement also had implications for changing the political meanings of 'black' in white society. However, it has not been until the last decade, through the global influence of Afro-American music, that a distinctly Indigenous sense of black sexiness has captured the attention of mainstream audiences. This article examines such recent developments, and suggests that, through the appropriation of Afro-American aesthetics and styles, Indigenous producers and performers have developed new forms of Indigenous public agency, demonstrating that black is beautiful, and Indigenous. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the antecedents to clothing disposal methods in two countries: Scotland and Australia. Increasing volumes of textiles are disposed of in landfill sites to the detriment of the environment. Extant research has identified the influences affecting an increased rate of purchasing and the trend to keep clothing for an ever shorter time. As such, it is imperative to examine the factors that affect consumers' choice of clothing disposal method as limited research has been undertaken in this area of socially responsible consumption. The results of a survey administered to a sample of female consumers in the two countries identify antecedents of three forms of clothing disposal methods: selling through eBay or second-hand shops, giving away to family or friends or donating to charities. Findings show differences between the countries regarding clothing disposal behaviour. Nevertheless, general recycling behaviour was found to be the strongest predictor for donating to charities in both countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The idea of "fashion" as being a characteristic of Australian culture is frequently regarded as a non sequitur. Fashion is seen as belonging to far-flung cosmopolitan sites elsewhere while Australia is a far-flung site cut off from the trappings of civilization. Equally, Australia has long been regarded as being cut off from the "finer things" of civility, fashion, and good taste. At best, an Australian sense of style is regarded as anything that is practical, informal, and casual T-shirts, practical footwear, moleskin trousers, and wide-brim hats: as an outfit thrown together without much thought. And yet, there has been an abiding interest in fashion since European settlement in Australia, even in the early days of the convict colony. One recurring element of this fascination with fashion is what it means to speak of distinctively "Australian" fashion as opposed to derivative styles copied from elsewhere. Does it make sense to imagine such a thing? Moreover, if there is such a phenomenon as Australian fashion, when does fashion and dress practice in Australia become un-Australian? This question lies at the heart of this article. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article critiques the system of size codification for women's clothing sold in Australia. It is broadly accepted that the fit of women's clothing is inconsistent and does not conform to a size standard. But why, what size are we really, and what influences our perception of size? An ad hoc system has evolved, that labels clothing size as defined in Standards Australia; AS1344-1997: Size coding scheme for women's clothing, but disregards the specified measurement data. Identified during research undertaken for a Masters of Textiles, this article examines factors that have influenced this evolution, in particular by the use of a codified rather than a representative system. Given that the consumer perception of size has been distorted by industry non-compliance to AS1344-1997, this article examines data from "The Real Australia Woman", a survey by the Research Institute for Gender and Health, University of Newcastle, to identify this perception. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]