Fashioning Memory: Vintage Style and Youth Culture

Description

The valuing of old clothes as "vintage" and the recollection of the sartorial past, whether through second-hand consumption or the wearing of new old-fashioned clothes, has become a widespread phenomenon. This book illuminates sartorial and bodily engagements with memory and time through the temporal and nostalgic potency of fashion, and what this means for contemporary wearers. Based on in-depth ethnographic research including participant observation and interviews with sixties enthusiasts in Germany, who relocate British mod style into the twenty-first century, Jenss examines the practices and experiences that are part of the sartorial remembering of "the sixties," from hunting flea markets and eBay, to the affect of material and mediated memories on vintage wearers. Jenss offers unique insights into the fashioning of time, cultural memory, and modernity, tracing the history and current appeal of vintage in fashion and youth culture, and asking: what kind of experiences of temporality and memory are enacted through fashion? How have evaluations of second-hand clothes shifted in the twentieth century? Fashioning Memory provides a unique insight into the diverse use of fashion as a memory mode and asks how style is remembered, performed, transformed, and reinvested across time, place, and generation.

Heike Jenss is Associate Professor of Fashion Studies, School of Art and Design History, Parsons The New School for Design, New York, USA.

This is a fascinating, worthwhile ethnographic and qualitative study of the choices of "sixties stylers" of Europe. Stylers wear clothes of the 1960s and form a subculture within the larger youth fashion demographic sector. Jenss (fashion studies, Parsons School of Design) provides an in-depth look at the different sectors within that already limited culture to show that clothing choices send messages. The book is an unusually concise and narrow study and important for its documentation. ... The book will be extremely useful as documentary evidence or counter evidence for other scholars' theoretical positions. As such, it is most beneficial to graduate level and advanced undergraduate readers. ... A welcome addition to any good research library. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above. * CHOICE * While we know about people dressing up in medieval and Renaissance, Victorian and Edwardian garb, Jenss is the first to investigate the sixties stylers ... Her book raises important questions not only about fashion but also about how people appropriate and engage with the past in everyday life. * German History * The author seamlessly draws on different analytical traditions and concepts in her analysis ... [which] never distorts the voices of the many, fascinating accounts collected. The ethnographic detail is fantastic ... This is also a delightful book to read. It is well written and organised with insightful reflections on fashion's relationship to memory. * Sociology * Fashioning Memory is the most in-depth, theoretically nuanced, and historically and ethnographically-informed work I have seen in fashion studies on concepts of time, memory, vintage, "retro," and authenticity. Jenss is pushing these concepts forward within an insightful framework that will have a strong impact for years to come. * Susan B. Kaiser, Interim Dean of Humanities, Arts and Cultural Studies, and Professor of Women and Gender Studies and Textiles and Clothing at the University of California, Davis, USA *