CfP Journal of Fashion, Style & Popular Culture

Timeline: All submissions due by June 1, 2013

This issue of Fashion, Style and Popular Culture will take an in depth look at the interface of popular music and style in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The sartorial element of music subcultures is basic to subcultural identity in that dress is a visual language that reflects the shared understandings of a culture.

Since the 1950s music scenes have been capable vehicles for social change, and in the past have been involved in dramatically reshaping social norms in many parts of the world. Many subcultures represent loosely organized resistance to social institutions, values, and practices and reinforce alternative ideologies. For youth, music subcultures and scenes have allowed them to create novel identities outside the restraints of the roles and expectations imposed upon them by family, school, and work. Group membership is meaningful because it confers social identity and permits self-evaluation for the individual. 

Music subcultures are unique in that they not only have a specific sound, which captivates the emotions and essence of its core, but they also have a defined visual style. Clothing has long been used as a cognitive stimulus that leads to the formation of impressions, helping to simplify and make sense of social interactions within groups and within society as a whole, where dress serves as a visual separation from the mainstream and a devotion to the ideologies of the subculture. In an ocular centric society such as we see today, image is supreme. The notion of spectacle found amongst the most extreme countercultures is itself powerful; it is simultaneously disturbing and at the same time fascinating. 

 Authors are invited to submit papers that explore the following:

•           The appropriation and commodification of music subcultural style by the fashion industry
•           Virtual music scenes and dress
•           Underground scenes and dress
•           Body image and music
•           Music and gender
•           Music, fashion and consumer culture
•           Music and the shaping of personal identity
•           The fragmentation of music subcultures and subcultural style.
•           Poseurs and the role of dress
•           Fandom and dress behavior
•           The cross-over of industries: Musicians as designers
•           And topics addressing the interfaces of music, style and fashion

Manuscripts should be approximately 5000 words and prepared using Intellect Journal House Style which may be accessed at:http://www.intellectbooks.co.uk/MediaManager/File/Intellect%20style%20guide.pdf.
Please send manuscripts to: Jessica Strubel at: Jessica.Strubel@unt.edu