“Style City” How London became a Fashion Capital

The book explains and explores in a critical as well as a celebratory way the birth of today’s London Designer identity and the evolution of London Fashion Week. It starts in the mid-Seventies when the cultural recognition of British fashion designers scarcely existed. It covers the rise of Vivienne Westwood, John Galliano, Katharine Hamnett and many others who were to become household names. But at the same time, it relates the persistent failure of the British government and the clothing industry to respond to successive opportunities, leaving designers to create an industry for themselves. It ends with British designers established worldwide and London Fashion Week as one of the world’s four premier fashion events

African Lace: an industrial fabric connecting Austria and Nigeria

Cet article vise à contextualiser l’apparition de la broderie africaine qui s’est développée depuis fort longue date au Nigeria. L’histoire de la production industrielle de la broderie au Nigeria n’a pas été étudiée et l’approche historique de cette étude est fondée sur de nombreux interviews de témoins de cette époque vivant au Nigéria, en Autriche et en Suisse. Cette présentation ne vise pas à l’exhaustivité tant il y a d’acteurs impliqués dans l’histoire de ces relations intercontinentales qui n’apparaissent pas dans cette présentation.Cette recherche s’inscrit dans le cadre d’un projet d’exposition collaborative qui visait à présenter pour la première fois les implications socio-culturelles de la broderie au Nigeria.This article tries to reconstruct how African lace first emerged and developed over the decades. The history of industrial embroideries in Nigeria has so far remained unwritten, and the historical overview here is based on numerous interviews with time witnesses in Nigeria, Austria, and Switzerland. The overview makes no claim to completeness, as far more actors were involved in this history of relations across continents than those whose accounts are summarized here. The research was part of a collaborative exhibition project that aimed to embrace the socio-cultural significance of Lace in Nigeria for the first time.Este artículo se propone reconstruir el surgimiento y desarrollo del bordado africano a lo largo de décadas. La historia de la producción industrial del bordado en Nigeria no ha sido estudiado hasta la fecha, y la aproximación histórica que propone este artículo se basa en numerosas entrevistas con testimonios de la época en Nigeria, Austria y Suiza. Sin embargo, este repaso histórico no tiene vocación de exhaustividad, pues muchos son los actores que forman parte de esta historia de relaciones intercontinentales y que no aparecen en este texto. Esta investigación formó parte de un proyecto de exposición colaborativa que tenía como objetivo presentar por vez primera las significación socio-cultural del bordado en Nigeria

Conflicts, integration, hybridization of subcultures: An ecological approach to the case of queercore

This paper investigates the case study of queercore, providing a socio-historical analysis of its subcultural production, in the terms of what Michel Foucault has called archaeology of knowledge (1969). In particular, we will focus on: the self-definition of the movement; the conflicts between the two merged worlds of punk and queer culture; the \u201cinternal-subcultural\u201d conflicts between both queercore and punk, and between queercore and gay\lesbian music culture; the political aspects of differentiation. In the conclusion, we will offer an innovative theoretical proposal about the interpretation of subcultures in ecological and semiotic terms, combining the contribution of the American sociologist Andrew Abbot and of the Russian semiologist Jurij Michajlovi\u10d Lotma

The Art of Prehistoric Textile Making

Textiles, textile production and clothing were essentials of living in prehistory, locked into the system of society at every level – social, economic and even religious. Textile crafts not only produced essential goods for everyday use, most notably clothing, but also utilitarian objects as well as representative and luxury items. Prehistoric clothing and their role in identity creation for the individual and for the group are also addressed by means of archaeological finds from Stone the Iron Age in Central Europe