The sound of fashion thinking

Faiers, Jonathan (2025) The sound of fashion thinking , Sternberg Press, 208pp.

Abstract

This book establishes Fashion Thinking as a new field of critical enquiry that utilises the many ways fashion is produced as a methodology with which to explore a range of contemporary cultural, political, economic and social concerns. Building upon the pioneering work of the 1980s that is now broadly recognised as the discipline of fashion theory, Fashion Thinking is a response to the current atrophying of fashion theory’s original potential. While contemporary fashion theory revels in its self-perception as interdisciplinary, promising its readers exciting excursions into alternative theoretical territories, it often as not comes as a poor relation to the table, invoking more ‘well-connected’ cousins such as fashion and anthropology, fashion and architecture, fashion and psychology etc. The use of the ubiquitous and has become a dominant feature of the landscape of fashion theory publishing.
Fashion Thinking, however, returns to the actual practices involved in the production of fashion in order to free itself from the academic conventions fashion theory has become mired in. Taking its cue from earlier etymological definitions of fashion and understanding it as making, or bringing into existence, fashion thinking is inspired by the very act of fashioning. So in the same way as material can be fashioned into a coat, literally a something produced from almost nothing, that same material can easily be unpicked and re-fashioned, or rethought into a completely new garment or object. This fluidity characterises fashion thinking, approaching each new topic according to specific demands and desires, cutting its cloth accordingly. Fashion Thinking like fashion itself is social, ludic, anticipatory, transformative, reciprocal and aims beyond interdisciplinarity to a state of indisciplinarity. Such a term implies the ability to be among disciplines but also to be outside of, oblivious to, or even unwilling to be ‘disciplined’, and preferring to explore the often turbulent, unruly and, like fashion, invariably seductive margins of disciplines and where they overlap.

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