ABSTRACT
The establishment of fashion studies as a relatively new field in the academy has coincided with an almost unbounded interest in fashion in the public arena. Unsurprisingly, this broader attention coincides with the escalating role of media and social media in particular in the everyday lives of people around the globe, enabling fashion to enter the realm of mass entertainment. Here, its more extravagant aspects have gained great attention, not least through the association with a burgeoning celebrity culture, where the famous promote fashion and some fashion designers have gained celebrity status (Church Gibson 2012). Fashion has become a contemporary spectacle which can be shared by anyone with access to visual media, without the viewer leaving the comfort of their homes or even putting on clothes. Yet it is clothes that are the stuff of fashion, material items that are worn on bodies that display the identities of individuals relative to chosen groups. Their form and appearance are conditioned by time and space, their selection influenced by place and occasion. Location is a key factor in thinking about contemporary fashion, not least in highlighting how the locus of production is centred in certain geographies, where fashionable clothes are made and then shipped worldwide.
