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The article discusses the sociopolitical and legal issues about the use of clothing and fashion in the U.S., particularly the semiotic and hermeneutical dimensions on the question of which dress can be legalized in the country with respect to constitutional issues like protected speech. It focuses on the controversies about the "Make America Great Again" (MAGA) hat to discuss the issues.

The fashion industry's focus on extreme thinness has been described as contributing to risk for disordered eating behaviors among fashion models, as well as the general public through the promotion of unattainable appearance ideals. As a result, increased interest in policy solutions that could alleviate the pressure placed on both models and the general public has emerged. The aim of the study was to build on prior research with fashion models to identify potential policy actions judged to be impactful and feasible to extend the research to other allied professionals within the fashion industry. The goal of this study is to inform ongoing efforts to implement effective policy. Individual interviews were conducted with n = 14 allied professionals from the fashion industry in the U.S. (including casting, creative, and modeling agency professionals), who were asked to evaluate seven potential policy initiatives in terms of their feasibility and capacity to positively impact fashion models. The two policies that were judged most positively included the requirement for models to seek a checkup from a healthcare provider twice a year and for compensation for models' work to be monetary and agreed upon. The opinions regarding the other five potential policy initiatives were either mixed or negative. Interviewees identified a number of barriers and facilitators for each of the seven potential policies. As efforts to implement policy in the fashion industry continue, these findings are critical for policymakers and community advocates to take into account. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research summary: This article examines how proximity to high‐status neighbors enables lower‐status firms to engage in aspirational pricing. While prior studies have focused on associations based on bilateral agreements, we argue that mere spatial proximity to other high‐status firms creates perceived associations, which positively affects the focal firm's aspirational pricing. Furthermore, middle‐status firms are most likely to engage in aspirational pricing because they are sufficiently similar to high‐status neighbors to expect assimilation, not contrast, effects. Our multi‐method approach based on panel data from the U.S. Vogue magazine and an experiment provides converging evidence for our arguments. Being somewhat randomly featured near the advertisements of prominent high‐status firms in Vogue positively impacts the subsequent average listed price of the focal firm's products, especially for middle‐status firms. Managerial summary High‐status firms tend to form relationships with other high‐status counterparts, making it difficult for lower‐status firms to ascend the status hierarchy and access status‐based benefits. This study shows that lower‐status firms may be able to obtain status‐based benefits, namely the ability to set higher prices for their products, by merely being proximate to other high‐status firms. Our analyses using data from Vogue magazine and online experiment show that having advertisements appear proximate to those of high‐status fashion firms enables the focal firm, especially middle‐status ones, to raise the prices of their products. As advertisement locations are somewhat random in that firms do not have control over determining their adjacent ads, our study highlights that lucky locations can sometimes be beneficial to disadvantage lower‐status firms. Video Abstract [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aspects of our identities such as sexuality and gender are negotiated through style-fashion-dress. We analyzed the recent history of style-fashion-dress through a queer lens by examining how queer identities have been negotiated on and around the body by women in the Midwest region of the United States from the late twentieth century to the present. Based on our research, we created an exhibition using community-participatory practices that allowed us to authentically tell the histories of ten queer-women's styles. We told stories that reflect some of the long-standing stereotypes of queer woman and the butch-femme dichotomy, but when we unpacked these histories, they more closely aligned with Kaiser and McCullough's "(k)notty model" metaphor. The women's garments, styles, and fashions represent the "shifting queer styles" that capture the lived experiences of midwestern queer women in the latter part of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the impact that inclusive marketing practices might have on society using modest fashion as a case study. The study employs an ethnographic approach to critical discourse analysis and explores the impact of modest fashion in reshaping the boundaries of exclusion and belonging in the United States. Throughout the paper, the author argues that as firms try to become more inclusive in the marketplace, they inadvertently reproduce existing power dynamics wherein nonthreatening forms of diversity are assimilated into a safe "new normal" while subversive "others" are further excluded. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We explored articulations of lesbian styles, fashions, and ways of dressing in mainstream fashion and media outlets within the United States during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Based upon our findings, we propose that there was trending ambivalence and multiple assemblages across space and time where the mainstream media did not necessarily perpetuate a single stereotypical or essentialist way of conceptualizing fashionable lesbians or lesbian fashions. However, we also noted across time a divide between representations of celebrity lesbians and the contemporary lived experience of ordinary lesbians. Though the press acknowledged this divide on occasion, they also established, circulated, and reinforced this difference. According to the press, while lesbians have been 'chic' since the 1990s–whether they embraced a butch or femme esthetic–the best way to be lesbian was to be rich, white, and fashionably dressed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An essay is presented which examines the concept of manhood during the U.S. Civil War. It discusses guerrilla fighters in the war, the historical study of relationships between men and women during the war as examined by historians Kristen Streater and LeeAnn Whites, and the literature of manhood in antebellum America and during the war. The essay also discusses personal fashion styles and how clothing reflected Union sympathizers and southern sympathizers in Missouri.

The process of moving goods from locations with the weakest rotation to those with high rotation in order to speed up the process of disposing of inventory in the entire retail network can be described as an assignment of goods. This process is particularly important in the textiles - based fashion industry, where external purchases for the retail network are often made once and the goods have shallow stocks. In order to optimise the stream of materials, the use of an integrated IT system is essential. Therefore, the main purpose of this publication is to show how IT solutions can be used to simplify the automation and optimisation of the process of generating proposals for goods reallocation within the retail network. The study covered selected companies from the textiles-based fashion industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to identify the influences of perceived enjoyment, perceived risks and attitude on the intention to rent fashion products for both Chinese and American consumers. Furthermore, this study is expected to empirically identify the differences between American and Chinese consumers in terms of motivations for and barriers to fashion renting. Design/methodology/approach: Data were collected through online surveys in both the USA and China. Data cleaning generated 412 usable samples in the USA and 301 usable responses in China. A series of t-test analyses and structural equation modeling were conducted to test the proposed hypotheses. Findings: Statistical results confirmed the positive influences of perceived enjoyment and attitude on fashion renting intention. In addition, the negative influences of perceived performance risk and social risk on attitude were also affirmed. Moreover, the results indicated that significant differences exist between American and Chinese consumers in terms of perceived risks and enjoyment of fashion renting, as well as attitude toward renting. Further, group comparison testing results discovered that differences existed in the factors influencing the intention to rent fashion products between American and Chinese consumers. Originality/value: This study initiates the attempt to investigate the motivations and obstacles for fashion renting intention for both American and Chinese consumers. The cultural comparison between Chinese and American consumers also delivers a comprehensive understanding of the motivations and obstacles behind the intention of fashion renting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The behavior of Negroes in the marketplace is shown to be integrally related to attempts to find full status in American Society. According to the authors. the Negro market divides "spontaneously" into two segments on the extent to which individual Negroes make the efforts to achieve this full status. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The events, festivals, and happenings of the late 1960s, especially those in the West coast areas of the United States, were predominantly music focused. During this period, and alongside these events, new types and modes of visual art, fashion, and graphic design emerged that were subsequently shared worldwide and are very familiar to us now. It can be argued that events such as the Monterey Pop Festival and Woodstock were progenitive and created the hippy style. If we look at the photographs, films, and posters from these events, there is little evidence of these new modes of practice. Very much like more recent events, the promotional material and documentation focus on the formally programed acts on the main stages as opposed to these other elements of the festival which is often where additional critical and intellectual innovation can be found. This essay will explore the nature of these festival events as sites that catalyze and subsequently promulgate new intellectual, critical, and creative forms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores how fashion is key to understanding the material legacies of urban development across East Asia, New York, and Los Angeles. Here, fashion is not just a material object, but a historical set of practices, relations, and migrant narratives. Fashion’s postcolonial legacies and diasporic connections have played a significant role in the development of industrial districts, special economic zones, and knowledge clusters across the Pacific. Likewise, fashion workers and designers continue to shape new urban geographies that stretch across and connect the US and Asia. Drawing upon ethnographic multi-sited fieldwork, and auto-ethnographic reflection, this article examines how the interplay between these industrial histories in garments, markets, labor and design, is shaped by both trans-Pacific and inter-Asian diasporic connections (across New York, LA, Seoul, Hong Kong, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Shanghai): connections that are vital for understanding the urbanization of contemporary fashion economies across the US and Asia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: In industries with network effects, consumer innovators help to trigger the critical mass needed for a product innovation to be successful. Thus, firms can benefit from actions that increase consumer innovativeness in their target markets. Consumer innovativeness has been associated with variables such as hedonic shopping motivation, impulsiveness and status seeking. There is limited work on the impact on consumer innovativeness of consumer characteristics that reflect consumers’ self‐confident ability to choose. This study proposes and tests a model for consumer innovativeness that incorporates variables from previous research and uncovers the importance of consumer self‐confidence. We collect survey data from 534 Chilean girls, ages 10–15. After building constructs with the help of exploratory factor analysis, we analyze the data with linear regression estimation (via OLS). Our results reveal that consumer self‐confidence is positively and significantly related to consumer innovativeness. Our findings also add evidence ‐from a younger age group‐ regarding the significance of status seeking, impulsiveness and hedonic shopping motivation on consumer innovativeness. Results suggest that companies could leverage consumer innovativeness by taking actions to increase consumers’ self‐confidence. Innovative apparel choices in young consumers could possibly also be strengthened by communicating status achievement and by enhancing shopping enjoyment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, tier-two fashion countries have been making gains in the global fashion industry, with hip young brands, buzz-worthy fashion weeks and export-oriented designers. The Canadian fashion industry, on the other hand, continues to fall behind and instead has experienced recent high-profile closures of leading domestic fashion names. This paper explores why this is the case by considering a wide range of factors from a historical and institutional perspective. We argue that Canadian fashion is facing a number of systemic problems relating to wider institutional and policy weaknesses, rather than a lack of talent and know-how within the entrepreneurs and businesses in the sector. While the fashion industry is indeed global, we argue that it is in fact national and local level factors-political, economic, and cultural-that structure and constrain the Canadian fashion industry for independent designers. Through exploring the experiences of this group of actors-entrepreneurial fashion designers-in this particular context, we not only learn about Canada as an economy but also what is needed in order to develop the fashion industry more broadly. We provide a framework for analysing the range of socio-economic, historical, and political factors at the national level which affect the performance of the fashion sector and the operation of fashion designers as the entrepreneurial actors at the heart of the industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the American fashion designer Elizabeth Hawes' design of skirts to be worn by men in the late 1960s, including her challenge to the traditional gender binary associated with clothing. Hawes' contestation of men and women binaries in clothing, including her social criticism of gender, conformity and fashion in her 1938 book "Fashion is Spanish," is discussed.

The article discusses the mainstream culture's angry response to Native Americans' rebukes for the cultural misappropriation of wearing war bonnets as a fashion in American popular culture. U.S. celebrities' wearing of war bonnets, including the American television personality Khloe Kardashian's use of war bonnets, is discussed.