Viscose, Issue 6 – Text

Viscose is the world’s most exciting journal for fashion criticism. Through specially edited thematic issues, each of which re-imagines the format of the journal entirely, Viscose gives space to genre-defying thinking that challenges and expands the possibilities of research, practice, and critique in/of fashion. In record time, the journal has cultivated a niche audience around the globe with stockists in over 15 countries, addressing intellectual fashion communities anywhere while rejecting ghettoization in any discipline, industry, or location. By collaborating with institutions and museums to cultivate research, Viscose is and remains proudly advertising-free.

In this issue:

The sixth issue of Viscose Journal focuses on fashion as constructed through words, language and writing. From the pens of fashion journalists and art critics to the conceptual wordplay of designers, the issue delves into the aesthetic and critical effects of “writing fashion” in and outside of fashion industries.

The fashion writer is a confidant, a storyteller, a forecaster, a mythmaker; they are evocative and poetic, forming words that shape, and in turn are shaped by, the latest fashions. From the salon shows to the pages of fashion magazines, their “expressions may be as ephemeral as the fashions they describe,” as Dorothy Hughes noted already in 1935. Early fashion writing played a key role in the transformation of clothes into fashion each season, and in igniting the machine of fashion itself. The historical roots of fashion writing— which was, at least in an industry context, a distinctly female practice— are grounded in the modernization and seasonalization of industrial fashion. And even today, in an age described by many as image-driven, this remains true: across various media platforms, language not only surrounds fashion but also continuously contributes to its creation.