Fashion Matters: The ‘Glocal’ Mix of Dutch Fashion

Anneke Smelik

doi:10.6092/issn.2611-0563/9964

Authors

Anneke Smelik Radboud University Nijmegen

She is Katrien van Munster professor of Visual Culture at the Radboud University Nijmegen (Netherlands). She published widely on identity, body, memory and technology in cinema, videoclips, digital art, and fashion. Her most recent books include Delft Blue to Denim Blue. Contemporary Dutch Fashion; Materializing Memory in Art and Popular Culture; Thinking Through Fashion. A Guide to Key Theorists; and a book in Dutch on cyborgs in popular culture. Her current research focuses on fashion theory and fashion, technology and sustainability. See: www.annekesmelik.nl

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2611-0563/9964

Keywords:

Cultural Heritage, Materiality, Glocalization, Dutch Fashion, New Materialism

Abstract

‘Fashion matters’ proposes a new-materialist framework to look at global fashion. A new-materialist approach helps to highlight fashion’s materiality and understand the hybrid mix of both local and global matters in fashion. An analysis of the material details of the – often ironic – use of cultural heritage in contemporary Dutch fashion (e.g. Viktor&Rolf, Klavers van Engelen, The People of the Labyrinths, Oilily, Scotch & Soda) reveals how Dutch fashion designers tap into local clothing styles and crafts. Such examples are part of a growing preoccupation with local roots in times of globalisation. The current interest of Western countries in their own local, national roots cannot be separated from a fascination for ‘cultural otherness’ and for ‘other’ local traditions. Fashion designers and firms establish a look that is both local and global at the same time; or: ‘glocal’. The ‘material turn’ enables an understanding of ‘glocal’ fashion as both a material reuse of local crafts and as an immaterial phenomenon of globalized identities.

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Fashion Matters: The ‘Glocal’ Mix of Dutch Fashion

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