Selected Publications
Fashion Knowledge: Theories, Methods, Practices and Politics.
Edited by Elke Gaugele and Monica Titton. Bristol: Intellect, 2022.
At a point when fashion studies are expanding and the fashion industry is at a crucial point of change, Fashion Knowledge makes a valuable contribution to the field. The book explores current issues in fashion research, with a focus on the relationship between theory and practice. This new edited collection assembles academic essays and intellectual activism next to visual essays and artistic interventions, proposing a different concept for fashion research that eschews the traditional logic of academic fashion studies. It features acclaimed designers, artists, curators, and theorists whose work investigates the multi-faceted debates on the rise of practice-based research in fashion. Contributors look at new forms of fashion knowledge that are forming along with shifting practices, shedding light on the entanglement of fashion and politics in both contemporary and historical moments.
Contributors: Elke Bippus, Elke Gaugele, Jojo Gronostay, Ruby Hoette, NCCFN, Priska Morger, Wally Salner, Andreas Spiegl, José Teunissen, Lara Torres, Carol Tulloch, Monica Titton, and Maria Ziegelböck.
Left: Agnolo Bronzino – Eleonora di Toledo (1543), Right: Rick Owens – Phlegethon (Spring Summer 2021).
Fashionable Bodies – Bodies of Fashion: Perspectives from the Renaissance to the Present
In: Sandbichler, Veronika; Schmitz-von Ledebur, Katja and Stefan Zeisler (eds.), 2021: Mode schauen: Fürstliche Garderoben vom 16. bis 18. Jahrhundert. Exhibition Catalogue, Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien/Schloss Ambras Innsbruck. Berlin: Hatje Cantz, pp. 67-69.
The chapter discusses Renaissance portraiture and dress in the context of the shifting morphology of the fashion body. Beginning in the Renaissance, where, for the first time, it functions as a site of self-assertion, the body plays a seminal role in fashion theory as a discursive field shaped by history, culture, politics, and society. Using various techniques, Renaissance fashion defied natural anatomy and created different, gender-specific silhouettes, some of which continue to inform contemporary clothes. The essay examines two parallel modes of fashionable body transformations in Renaissance attire, and discusses them in relation to current fashion practices
Jakob Lena Knebl, Contemporary Witchcraft, 2017. Foto: Georg Petermichl
Season of the Witches
In: Trummer, Thomas D. (ed.), 2021: Jakob Lena Knebl & Ashley Hans Scheirl. Seasonal Greetings. Exhibition Catalogue, Kunsthaus Bregenz. Berlin: Walther König.
“Witchcraft is the recourse of the dispossessed, the powerless, the hungry, the abused.
It gives hear and tongue to stones and trees. It wears the rough skin of beasts.
It turns on a civilization that knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.
Witchcraft is a force, not an order. Witchcraft is rhizomatic, not hierarchic.
Witchcraft defies organization, not meaning. We simply bear the marks.”
(Peter Gray, “The Manifesto of Apocalyptic Witchcraft” (2013), in: Breanne Fahs, Burn it Down! Feminist Manifestos for the Revolution, New York/London, 2020, p. 294.)
The essay discusses the installation Seasonal Greetings at the homonymous exhibition by Jakob Lena Knebl and Hans Ashley Scheirl at Kunsthaus Bregenz within the context of feminist art history, the evolution of capitalism, and feminist activism. The artists orchestrated an inter- and multimedia witch’s sabbath and celebrated the witch as a feminist icon, as a key figure in women’s history, as the patron saint of queer outsiders, and as an ambivalent fairy tale figure. The witches’ floor of Seasonal Greetings not only evokes associations with the relatively new, positively connoted image of witches in pop culture, but also draws on archaic visual narratives of the witch as a deeply ambivalent female figure of the pre-modern era.
Fashion and Postcolonial Critique.
Edited by Elke Gaugele and Monica Titton. Berlin/New York: Sternberg Press, 2019. Publication Series of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, vol. 22.
Fashion and Postcolonial Critique outlines a critical global fashion theory from a postcolonial perspective. It investigates contemporary articulations of postcolonial fashion critique, and analyzes fashion as a cultural, historical, social, and political phenomenon involved in and affected by histories of colonial domination, anti-colonial resistance, and processes of decolonization and globalization.
Contributors: Christine Checinska, Christine Delhaye, Burcu Dogramaci, Sonja Eismann, Elke Gaugele, Gabriele Genge, Birgit Haehnel, Sabrina Henry, Helen Jennings, Alexandra Karentzos, Hana Knížová, Christian Kravagna, Gabriele Mentges, Birgit Mersmann, Heval Okcuoglu, Walé Oyéjidé Esq., Leslie W. Rabine, Ruby Sircar, Angela Stercken, Sølve Sundsbø, Monica Titton.
The book is available as an open access publication in the digital repository of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.
Afterthought: Fashion, Feminism and Radical Protest
In: Fashion Theory - The Journal of Dress, Body and Culture (vol. 23, issue 6, 2019), special issue “Fashion as Politics: Dressing Dissent” edited by Elke Gaugele and Monica Titton, pp. 747-756.
We are currently witnessing an uncommon politicization of fashion as an expression of protest and dissent: fashion designers are making use of the runway as a site of resistance, and design clothes that communicate defiance against a global political climate characterized by the rise of far right, authoritarian and populist political movements.
As a postscript to this special issue dedicated to fashion, politics and dissent, this essay is an attempt to make sense of a development that influences contemporary fashion and to point out some of the conflicts and contradictions that arise out of the convergence of feminism, fashion and radical protest. In order to comprehend the contemporary vogue of feminist fashion and fashionable feminism respectively, and to understand the dialectic between these two phenomena, the essay reconstructs how feminism has become fashionable yet again, and which forms of feminism and feminist activism have entered the cultural and political mainstream.
Arachne - An Almanac of Clothing and Culture
Taking its name from Greek mythology, Arachne is an almanac of clothing and culture made in Vienna that weaves together stories about fashion, art and life. Arachne chronicles, showcases and comments the work of Modeklasse, the Fashion Department of the University of Applied Arts Vienna.
Editor in Chief: Monica Titton
Creative Director & Fashion Editor: Federico Protto
Edition Angewandte, edited by Gerald Bast. Basel: Birkhäuser Verlag, 2019.
Tavi Gevinson in 2010 at the Dior Haute Couture fashion show, wearing a big bow-shaped hat by Stephen Jones.
Blogging the Female Self: Authorship, Self-Performance and Identity Politics in Fashion Blogs
In: Ulfsdotter, Boel; Backman, Rogers, Anna (eds.), 2018: Female Agency and Documentary Strategies: Subjectivities, Identities and Activism. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 38.56.
This paper examines the narrative and performative practices set forth by the two fashion bloggers and feminist media entrepreneurs Leandra Medine and Tavi Gavinson and discusses the transformation of female authorship and self-construction within digital culture. Fashion blogs are examined as social spaces pertinent to feminist discourses on privacy and domesticity, identity politics and are discussed in the context of postfeminist theorising on female agency and neoliberalism.
Ready-Made-Mode - Über Vêtements
In: Pop: Kultur und Kritik, Heft 9 (2016), pp. 69- 79.
Amber Valletta wears Spring 1997 Helmut Lang in a photograph by Steven Meisel from Vogue, January 1997.
Austrian Fashion: Helmut Lang’s Metamorphoses
In: Denegri, Dobrila (ed.), 2017: Transfashional: Experimental Fashion in the Context of Contemporary Art. Vienna: Universität für angewandte Kunst Verlag, pp. 194-204.
This essay examines the legacy of fashion designer Helmut Lang with a focus on his close affinity and proximity to artists. Lang’s collaborations with artists such as Jenny Holzer or Louise Bourgeois differed from other collaborations between fashion designers and artists. In essence, his approach was distinguished by a conceptual transfer, rather than a simple exchange of stylistic, decorative or aesthetic elements. The essay argues that Lang employed strategies of appropriation art within the context of fashion, thus creating a meta-commentary on fashion design as an ever-referential, connotative and self-reflexive practice, in which the notions of originality and original are just as outdated as they are in contemporary art.
Fashion Criticism Unraveled: A Sociological Critique of Criticism in Fashion Media
International Journal of Fashion Studies, Vol. 3 (2016), number 2, pp. 209-223.
The starting point for this article is the observation that in fashion, there is no established form of criticism compared to the art system or the literary system. The intent of this article is to provide a critical sociological analysis of the relationship between the fashion industry and fashion media and to trace the limits imposed on fashion criticism by this mutual structural-economic-dependency. The article examines the socio-economic and cultural ties between the fashion industry and fashion media since the 19th century to the present and investigates the consequences of these ties for the development and limits of criticism in fashion journalism. The article discusses the emergence of a discourse of normative constraint in digital media and argues that the advent of digital fashion media led to an intensification of the economic limitations to fashion criticism.
Takashi Murakami, Eye Love SUPERFLAT White, 2003 (used as a canvas design for the collaboration with Louis Vuitton).
Andy’s Heritage: Collaborations between Fashion, Art and Louis Vuitton
In: Gaugele, Elke (ed.), 2014: Aesthetic Politics in Fashion. Berlin/New York: Sternberg Press, pp. 60-75.
The paper analyzes collaborations between fine artists and fashion designers on a common product by the example of the cooperation between Marc Jacobs for the fashion label Louis Vuitton with the artists Takashi Murakami and Richard Prince in 2003 and 2008, respectively. Both Murakami and Prince overcome the notion of authentic, singular and individual art works and the myth of the artist as creative genius in their artistic practices—either by enacting art as the result of an artistic guild/merchandise factory/Warholian enterprise or by undermining the very concept of authorship and singularity.
Erschöpfte Prominenz
In: Neckel, Sighard; Wagner, Greta (eds.), 2013: Leistung und Erschöpfung: Burnout in der Wettbewerbsgesellschaft. Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag, pp. 86-103.
Fashion in the City: Street Style Blogs and the Limits of Fashion’s Democratization.
In: Texte zur Kunst, special issue “Mode für alle”, edited by Isabelle Graw and Monica Titton, Issue 78 (2010), pp. 133-138.
Fashionable Personae: Self-Identity, Collective Narratives and Enactments of Fashion Narratives in Fashion Blogs
Fashion Theory, Vol. 19 (2015), issue 2, pp. 201-220.
This article scrutinizes the practices and strategies mobilized by fashion bloggers in the construction of a subject position which is embedded in established fashion narratives and based on references to the self and self-representation. Based on empirical research with qualitative methods using a grounded theory approach, this article discusses a construct of subjectivity labeled as “fashionable persona.” The “fashionable persona” is understood as a situated, narrative, and performative character developed by bloggers specifically for their blogs that is anchored simultaneously in the blogger's self-identity and in the enactment of collective cultural narratives.
“Kapitalistischer Realismus.” Die künstlerische Gesellschaftskritik.
In: Neckel, Sighard (ed.), 2010: Kapitalistischer Realismus: Von der Kunstaktion zur Gesellschaftskritik. Frankfurt/M.: Campus, pp. 11-30.
Styling the Street: Fashion Performance, Stardom and Neo-Dandyism on Street Style Blogs.
In: Bruzzi, Stella; Church Gibson, Pamela (eds.), 2013: Fashion Cultures Revisited: Theories, Explorations and Analysis. London/New York: Routledge, pp. 128-137.
This chapter scrutinizes the representation of fashion editors on street style blogs, and reconstructs the phenomenon within the context of fashion photography, fashion history and celebrity culture. Street style blogs are discussed as sites of a form of public fashionable performance that goes back to the practices of the Dandies, and the chapter shows how street style blogs contributed to the constitution of a new category of cyber-celebrities and the reinforcement of prevailing power structures and visual narratives.
hashtag RICH: Zur medialen Inszenierung von Luxus und Reichtum in Instagram und im Reality-Fernsehen
In: Ruelfs, Esther (ed.), 2014: Fette Beute - Reichtum zeigen. Exhibition Catalogue, Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg. Berlin: Kerber, pp. 188-193.
Sternstunden der Soziologie. Wegweisende Theoriemodelle des soziologischen Denkens. Edited by Sighard Neckel, Ana Mijic, Christian von Scheve and Monica Titton.
Frankfurt/M.: Campus, 2010.
The book was awarded the René König Textbook Award (René-König-Lehrbuchpreis) by the German Sociological Association (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Soziologie) in 2010.