ESSAYS
Alexandra Palmer – Jeremy Laing
John Potvin – A Love that Dare not Speak its Name in Public: Clothes Come Out of the Closet
Bradley Quinn – Fashion Space
Kimberly Wahl – Commercial Art Form or Artful Commerce? Photography and the Subversive Potential of the ‘Fashionable’ Body in Visual Culture
Camilla Singh – Curator’s Statement: Art + fashion Mmeet (again)
Sara Diamond – Holier Than Thou: The Art and Fashion Mirror/Mirror
Mark Kingwell – The Theory Theory; or, The Fashion System Revisited


ANNALS OF TRAVEL
Virgil Burnett – Maurice Darantiere and High Fashion
Pauline Carey – My Fling in Fashion
Théodora Armstrong – Harajuku Beau Monde


MEMOIR
David Livingstone – Fashion Album
Armando Pajalich – On and In Dsquared2
Mary Hagey – Style & Grace
Katherine Ashenburg – My Vogue Years
Virginia Johnson – The Craft of Fashion


FICTION
kath macLean – Minute Particulars of Grace: Reading Katherine Mansfield and May Sarton in the Bath
Adam Jeffries Schwartz – The Fashion Psychic
Cathy Marie Buchanan – Beading Miss O’Leary’s Wedding Gown
Andrew Tibbetts – Ugly is the New Pretty
Juliet Bates – Leaving


POETRY
Simon Leigh – Fabulous Fifties Fashions
Donna J. Gelagotis Lee – Horse Auction; How Things Are
Rich Landers – Révellion; Smoking Jacket; Ode to Flamenco; Louise Brooks, 1928
Jennifer Footman – Grand-daughter; Visitation Outfit
Ron Charach – While Harry Rosen Slept
Lindsay Zier-Vogel – Fly and Sew; McCall’s Magazine: March 1916
David Penhale – Thrift Shop at Halloween

PORTFOLIOS
Ryan Burghard – Masks
Chantale Michaud – Worship
Lydia K – Garment and Fabric Works
Kris Knight – Pompadours
Various Artists – Paper Machete: Fashion Session

Costume Resource List
Barbara Rice and Suzanne McLean – Fashion and Historic Costume Resource List

Back of the Book
Contributors’ Notes
Co-Editor’s Diary piKe krpan
Production Editor’s Diary Jade Colbert
News and Notes
Advertisements

Under a narrow border
of stem green, leaf green,
serifs hedge the letters tight,
McCall’s Magazine.

And under this stretch of careful capital letters,
a woman holds daffodils,
yellow and outlined in black,
an armful, a gardenful,
their trumpeting yellow repeated in the buttons on her blouse,
in the colour of her gloves —
one holds the stems,
the other holds her hip.

The birds behind her pose soar black as text,
Spring Fashions interrupting their flight.

Her coat is open at her neck,
tied loose at her waist
and blue blue, the colour the sky
has not yet been this year:
March pause 5 cents pause 1916.

(NOTE: excerpt of full text)

Of course, fashion speaks in sights — a universal tongue. A nice dress can look the same in New York or Paris or Milan. By way of fashion, all those places can turn into no place in particular, so you make an effort to bone up, to particularize place again. For years when headed to Milan I would carry Dante, never getting around to reading any more of it than I did back in university studying it in class with a professor named Beatrice. Not that I haven’t read enough to think of the circles of hell every time I walk into a fashion show and see how the press have been arranged.

(NOTE: excerpt of full text)

The night-blue cocktail dress was inspired by Eva Marie Saint. My mother told me this as she knelt on the sitting room floor placing the paper dress pattern over the satin. That Wednesday she had gone to the cinema alone and later described to me what she had seen: a black jacket on the train to Chicago, a dark grey dress and a revolver in the cafeteria, an orange suit clambering across the faces of Mount Rushmore. She knew the names of the cloth, she could explain the way that the fabric fitted on the shoulders and around the waist, the way it fell from the hips to the knees. Then she told me about the grey hotel bedroom in Chicago: grey walls, grey carpet, grey bed cover, the bedside lamp with its pewter base and the black lacquered furniture. She described the red, flowered cocktail dress: the boat neck and the three-quarter length sleeves. She told me about the ruby necklace, about the gold hair that draped over Eve Kendal's face, the glass of yellow scotch that she held in her hand, and as my Mother talked, it seemed as though she had discovered something.

(NOTE: excerpt of full text)

On the overpass above the train station, a girl in a bridal gown sits on the sidewalk sharing her lunch with a hot pink version of RoboCop. At the entrance to Yoyogi Park, six variations on Elvis, each wearing ten-inch pompadours, dance around a portable stereo blasting “Jailhouse Rock”. On the street corner in front of the Gap, a girl in an electric blue latex baby-doll dress with matching jelly sandals poses demurely with a plastic ice cream cone. The khaki outfits in the Gap window display suddenly seem more mundane than usual as a vivid pageantry of teenagers litter the front steps of the store. This is the kind of fantastical costumery usually reserved for haute couture runways or Halloween night, but in Harajuku it is just another Sunday afternoon.