The sixth issue of Viscose Journal focuses on fashion as constructed through words, language and writing.
From the pens of fashion journalists and art critics to the conceptual wordplay of designers, the issue delves into the
aesthetic and critical effects of “writing fashion” in and outside of fashion industries.
The fashion writer is a confidant, a storyteller, a forecaster, a mythmaker; they are evocative and poetic, forming words that shape,
and in turn are shaped by, the latest fashions. From the salon shows to the pages of fashion magazines, their “expressions may be
as ephemeral as the fashions they describe,” as Dorothy Hughes noted already in 1935. Early fashion writing played a key role in the
transformation of clothes into fashion each season, and in igniting the machine of fashion itself. The historical roots of fashion writing—
which was, at least in an industry context, a distinctly female practice— are grounded in the modernization and seasonalization of
industrial fashion. And even today, in an age described by many as image-driven, this remains true: across various media platforms,
language not only surrounds fashion but also continuously contributes to its creation.
The succinct, ephemeral poetry of the fashion writer still plays—nearly a century since Hughes’ observation—a transformative role
in the seasonal turnover of fashion, but its role in the fashion industry remains seriously overlooked. Fashion invests substantially
in seasonally refreshing the visual messaging accompanying its physical commodities, but language plays a similarly important support
in this artful game of marketing. In this industrial context spanning from press releases to magazine production, writing is devoted to
fashion promotion, prioritizing its fundamental traits of novelty, urgency, and semiotic complexity. In this context, fashion writing is a process
of mystification, capable of revealing things that the image cannot. The material conditions of fashion writing—of being for fashion—
generates a unique set of poetics and syntax. Fashion writing, or “written fashion,” as Roland Barthes asserts, is a form of signification that
is simultaneously real and imaginary, connected to the real garment that it signifies, but largely unencumbered by its materiality.
Given the constraints of economic, cultural, and political factors on fashion writing, it is perhaps more interesting to ask, what is fashion writing
really encumbered by, and what would it mean to “unencumber” it?
Since Baudelaire, art critics have turned to fashion as source material for their practice, casting fashion in the role of art’s capitalist
conspirator, temporal truth-sayer, or feminine alter-ego. This erratic history is one filled with both fraught politics (rooted in a gendered
division of labor) as well as critical possibility: art writing gestures to a style of intellectualism and independence from industry that is
largely foreign in fashion. Viscose Journal has, since its founding, aimed to detach fashion criticism from industrial frameworks that has
historically premised it. At the same time, informed by a materialist politics of fashion labor, we wish to seriously level the largely female writing
of commercial fashion publications with the masculine philosophical inquiries of fashion.
While “fashion writing” denotes a thematic category within the wider field of writing, our theme of “writing fashion” prompts an exploration of
fashion writing as a mode of fashion production and critique. This issue aims to explore writing as a tool for shaping fashion and broaden
its perspectives by presenting a survey of experimental, fictocritical, and poetic approaches to writing fashion. In this expanded field of writing,
“fashion” unfolds as a ubiquitous and epistemologically complex phenomena of everyday life pertinent to all.
Accompanied by the exhibition “Writing Fashion“ at and published by the International Library for Fashion Research in Oslo, Norway,
staged in June 2024, Viscose Journal 06 strives to be a thought-provoking journey into the captivating intersection of fashion and language.
We are grateful to the library’s fantastic team and collaborators for their ongoing support and collaboration.
Founded in Tokyo in 2010, twelvebooks is a distributor specializing in art books.
As the exclusive Japanese representative for selected international publishers, twelvebooks manages the distribution
and promotion of their publications with a vision of making art books more widely accessible.
twelvebooks is also involved in various art book initiatives, including organizing the TOKYO ART BOOK FAIR.
In November 2024, twelvebooks opened SKWAT/twelvebooks in Nishikameari, Katsushika, a space that offers public access to its storage warehouse.
