Fast x Slow Fashion: Experiences of Fashional Consumption 1720 – 2020 will investigate the varied experiences of selling, buying and consuming fashion over the past 300 years in a one-day conference.

Shopping for fashion is about more than economic exchange and the acquisition of material goods. It is about the performance and negotiation of fashionable identity, sensory stimulation and visual pleasure. Fashion retailers provide spaces in which individuals can reinvent themselves and negotiate their relationships to wider society, and consumer desire provides an opportunity for business people to build retail empires that change the dressing habits of nations.

Fashion retail is often at the forefront of social and economic change, with the way that publicity, merchandising and spectacle is used to sell fashion evolving in response to changing technologies of fashionable production and communication. Historically, there have been many different sites of fashionable consumption, from street markets to boutiques and spectacular department stores.

Ways in which fashion has been consumed have been even more varied, from the personal experience of commissioning a bespoke suit to the frustrated desire of noses pressed against a shop window, dreaming of the unobtainable behind the glass. Furthermore, experiences of fashionable consumption can be both material and visual, incorporating the experience of reading fashion publications and mail order catalogues in a domestic setting as well as that of the knowledgeable buyer who evaluates the quality of fabrics through touch.

Full conference programme:

Fast x Slow Fashion: Experiences of Fashionable Consumption, 1720 - 2020

09.45 – 10.05 Registration and coffee

10.05 – 10.10 Welcome and introduction

10.10 - 11.00 Keynote

Material Literacy and the Consumer: Consumption, Making and the Materiality of Dress, 1750-1820

Serena Dyer

11.00 - 12.20 Panel 1: Senses, Emotion and the Desire to Consume

The Cry of Silk: Fetishism and Erotomania in Au Bonheur des Dames

Wendy Smith

Looking Good: A Short History of Visual Merchandising at M&S

Katie Cameron

Consuming the Past: Shopping for Vintage and Second-hand Fashion Since 1965

Liz Tregenza

12.20 – 13.30 Lunch

[13.00 – 13.25 Optional exhibition tour]

13.30 - 14.50 Panel 2: Remaking, Reuse and Slow Fashion

Slow Fashion Shopping in Shanghai

Natascha Radclyffe-Thomas

The Potential of Living History in Promoting Sustainable Clothing Consumption

Jenny Gilbert and Nadia Awal

The Calicos of Our Grandmothers: On the reuse of 18th century silks in 1820s-40s dress

Ruby Hodgson

14.50 – 15.10 Tea and coffee break

15.10 – 17.00 Panel 3: Geographies of Consumption

Making Dallas into a Fashion Capital

Regina Lee Blaszczyk

Shopping on Tour: Continental Journeys with Two Scottish Matriarchs, 1730-1750

Emily Taylor

Cities of Arcades: Magical Dreamscapes of Fashion, Consumption and the Flâneur(se)

Nathaniel Dafydd Beard

Just Like the Kings Road, Only Nearer': Selling Swinging London in Glasgow

Jade Halbert

17.00 Closing remarks.

SHARES