Post by Dr Benjamin Wild

Is fashion a belief? The sister of death? An empire? The favourite child of capitalism? A system? The latest open access issue of Fashion Highlight Journal, which I have edited with Dr. habil. Natalia Berger, interrogates how language, understood in its broadest sense and encompassing academic debate, social media, sustainability reports, influencer captions and product copy, enables fashion to produce meaning. Drawing on the work of Roland Barthes and Yuri Lotman's semiosphere, our international and interdisciplinary contributors explore how fashion's "centre" stabilises comfortable narratives — eg. creativity, luxury — while pushing inconvenient realities (eg. textile waste, labour conditions, cultural erasure) to the periphery. From greenwashed influencer content to the politics of English loanwords in fashion vocabulary, our issue maps where fashion's language says everything — except what it can't afford to. The issue is organised in three parts: (1) Essays interrogate fashion's discursive infrastructures — from the Atacama Desert as a semiotic threshold, to material intelligence and craft; (2) Fashion Mythologies, inspired by Barthes, seek to unpack the stories fashion tells about bakers, kimonos, fast fashion and time; (3) Our Fashion Lexigraphy pulls apart the loaded vocabulary of the industry itself, reappraising the meanings of standardised sizing, gender-fluid fashion, and flattery. Collectively, our contributors address a hard and pressing question: as fashion's discourse expands — is it becoming more inclusive, or just louder? We are grateful to Paolo Franzo and his editorial team at Università degli Studi di Firenze, to the global team of peer reviewers and, of course, to our contributors: BARBARA ALEJANDRA PINO AHUMADA | CAROLA BORGIA | Danae Ioannou IOANNOU | KRISTEN HALLGEISLER | Srijana Baruah | HUEI-WEN LO | MATTHEW COATS | MICHELLE MARSHALL | Doris Posch | Donna Cleveland | PETER CLEVELAND | Hanh Nguyen | Corinna Joyce | Matthias Waldhart | Titi Kristina Rylander | ELEONORA CECERE | Susanna Testa | LIDIA TENUTA | Giulia Ciola | Maria S. BATTISTONI | Nathan Douenburg | Maria Delifoti Nikodem | CARLOS GARCíA-REYES | ESTER G. MECíAS | Clizia Moradei | Leila Kelleher | SHANNON FLAHERTY | Karmen Samson | Judith Beyer, PhD | Dr. Aliena Guggenberger https://lnkd.in/e4pCw-XX