Ilya Parkins
Biographic Data
| ID | 912408 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Ilya Parkins |
| GIVEN NAMES | Ilya |
| FAMILY NAME | Parkins |
| SIGNATURE | PARKINS I |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of British Columbia |
| ORCID | 0009-0004-6270-5038 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 21 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 32 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 20 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2007 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Introduction: ‘Affiliative Fashion, Relational Analysis and Power’
This Special Issue introduction reflects on the tendency, in fashion studies, to focus on fashion and dress mainly as forms of personal expression. We argue that, to counter this trend, fashion studies needs to orient itself to fashion and dress as primarily relational domains, which affiliate wearers and makers with other people, networks and institutions and implicate dress in flows of power. This will enable fashion studies to better realize i…
Fashion and Feeling: The Affective Politics of Dress
Fashion and Feeling will explore the complex nexus of fashion and the feeling body from a variety of critical perspectives.
Feminist sentimentalism? Ambivalent feeling in inclusive digital wedding media
This article traces textual sentimentalism on popular, feminist wedding blog A Practical Wedding. In dialogue with Lauren Berlant’s work on sentimentalism as essentially apolitical and with feminist reclamations of the sentimental, it examines whether A Practical Wedding develops a feminist sentimentalism. Juxtaposing two of the blog’s foundational genres, the real wedding feature and the advice column, it excavates the blog’s invocations of the …
Making a Reality: Inclusive Wedding Vendors and Extramarket Morality
This article analyses a series of interviews with queer-positive wedding apparel and style providers. Vendors’ descriptions of their relationships with clients reveal a prioritization of embodied intersubjectivity. We explore vendors’ construction of themselves as providing respite, in the wedding apparel production process, from clients’ repertoire of experiences of exclusion in a hetero- and cisnormative fashion industry. The intercorporeal eth…
Fashion and Feeling: The Affective Politics of Dress
Introduction: Theorising Fashion Media
Commodity Feminism and Dressing the 'Best Self' onA Practical Wedding
Fashion as a cultural industry, with its interface between self and social, is laden with potential for interventions in systems of power. Yet its changemaking potential is susceptible to co-optation by neoliberal discourses that harness politics with a commodified, perfectible individuality that superficially counteracts hegemony even as it subtly reinforces it. So much is evident in nominally feminist wedding website A Practical Wedding, which …
You’ll Never Regret Going Bold”: The Moods of Wedding Apparel on a Practical Wedding
This paper analyzes textual representations of wedding apparel on popular feminist wedding blog A Practical Wedding (APW). APW’s mediations of wedding clothing harness the transformative dimensions of weddings and wedding apparel. Drawing on the critical literature about moods and the political present, I argue that APW’s discussions of dress that is inclusive of all bodies can be seen as an attempt to instantiate extraordinary moods that depart …
Introduction: Fashion and Feminist Politics of the Present
This article introduces the special issue on fashion and features an analysis of the current state of the relationship between the fashion system and feminist scholarship. Important points of convergence are identified, including the link between the so-called democratisation of fashion and the recent resurgence of feminism in mass culture, fashion’s introduction of complex models of identity, embodiment and materiality, its foregrounding of clas…
Interview with Reina Lewis
This interview with leading fashion studies scholar Reina Lewis discusses the various foci of her research about fashion and visual culture: orientalism, religion (especially Islam), and queer sexualities. The interview highlights the intersection between these strands of Lewis’s work. Parkins and Lewis discuss what these intersections might reveal about regimes of visibility for differently marginalized groups, historically and in the contempora…
How racialized students navigate campus life in a mid-sized Canadian city: Thrown Against a White Background' but 'Comfortable Enough to Laugh
We studied how racialized students navigate and cope with campus life amidst a context of discrimination in a midsize Canadian city. Using a situational analysis approach informed by participatory action research principles, our analysis revealed two overarching themes: (1) Thrown Against a White Background, representing frequent encounters of White normativity and supremacy often experienced through racially-based social stigma, marginalization …
Domesticating enchantment: Mediating feminine magic in the interwar French fashion magazine
This article examines men’s writing about women as vectors of enchantment in three interwar French women’s magazines, La Femme Chic à Paris, Vogue and Gazette du Bon Ton. Such articles appeared frequently, and modernised the ancient discourse of feminine enchantment by locating it in tropes of industrial modernity, including women’s fashion and style. While enchantment is a promising concept for feminist and critical scholars, its representation …
Hurricane Sandy inVogue: Fashion, Disaster and Urban Neoliberalism
New York Vogue published a photographic feature just over two months after Hurricane Sandy hit the Eastern seaboard of the USA, to commemorate the work of New York City emergency responders in the wake of the disaster. Juxtaposing fashionably clad models with responders, the feature invoked a gendered and classed rhetoric of fashion, crisis, and temporality to create both a memory of the disaster, and a vision of the metropolis and its future. Th…
Nineteen Funerals”: Ethics of Remembering Murdered Women in a Service Learning Classroom
In the winter of 2010, as the professor of an introductory Gender Studies course in a Canadian university, author Ilya Parkins was involved in a community service learning project centered on the memorialization of women murdered in her university's local community. In this article, Parkins considers what limited this project, which was so promising in its addressing of a need articulated by a community partner, a local women's organization. She …
Texturing Visibility: Opaque Femininities and Feminist Modernist Studies
This essay examines women's spectacularly visible status in feminised mass cultural domains in the first decades of the twentieth century. Feminine spectacles are commonly understood to invite viewers to access women's bodies, yet early twentieth-century spectacles paradoxically called renewed attention to women's illegibility. Women's visual prominence made apparent their 'unknowability', recasting an ancient ideational heritage in modern terms.…
Poiret, Dior and Schiaparelli: Fashion, Femininity and Modernity
Through a highly original and detailed analysis of the memoirs, interviews and other life writings of Poiret, Dior and Schiaparelli, this book explores changing notions of femininity in the early decades of the twentieth century, when the democratization of fashion began. Examining the idea of modernity, eternity and the ephemeral in the writings of these haute couturiers, the book reflects on fashion's ambivalent approach to women, which both ce…
The Public Time of Private Space in Dior by Dior
This essay reads the life writing of major French fashion designer Christian Dior as an extended meditation on the challenging relationship between public persona and intimate selfhood for a celebrity fashion designer. Dior works through the tension between public and private by referring it to a complex nexus of space and time; his narration of his life through the lens of his childhood homes suggests not only a spatial orientation but a fraught…
Fashion as Methodology: Rewriting the time of women’s modernity
Recent feminist scholarship has shown that women's anteriority to 'the modern' - and even to time itself - was a powerful and persistent feature of the temporal imaginary at the height of industrial modernity, from about 1860 to 1940. Neo-Marxist work on the time of modernity, for its part, indicates that the dualistic understanding of temporality that structures the trope of feminine timelessness is marked by instabilities and contradictions. Fa…
Building a Feminist Theory of Fashion: Karen Barad's Agential Realism
Fresh Lipstick: Redressing Fashion and Feminism by Linda M. Scott
(2007). Fresh Lipstick: Redressing Fashion and Feminism by Linda M. Scott. Fashion Theory: Vol. 11, No. 2-3, pp. 365-367
Feminist Witnessing and Social Difference: The Trauma of Heterosexual Otherness in Vera Brittain's Testament of Youth
Building a Feminist Theory of Fashion: Karen Barad's Agential Realism
Fashion as Methodology: Rewriting the time of women’s modernity
Recent feminist scholarship has shown that women's anteriority to 'the modern' - and even to time itself - was a powerful and persistent feature of the temporal imaginary at the height of industrial modernity, from about 1860 to 1940. Neo-Marxist work on the time of modernity, for its part, indicates that the dualistic understanding of temporality that structures the trope of feminine timelessness is marked by instabilities and contradictions. Fa…
How racialized students navigate campus life in a mid-sized Canadian city: Thrown Against a White Background' but 'Comfortable Enough to Laugh
We studied how racialized students navigate and cope with campus life amidst a context of discrimination in a midsize Canadian city. Using a situational analysis approach informed by participatory action research principles, our analysis revealed two overarching themes: (1) Thrown Against a White Background, representing frequent encounters of White normativity and supremacy often experienced through racially-based social stigma, marginalization …
Introduction: Fashion and Feminist Politics of the Present
This article introduces the special issue on fashion and features an analysis of the current state of the relationship between the fashion system and feminist scholarship. Important points of convergence are identified, including the link between the so-called democratisation of fashion and the recent resurgence of feminism in mass culture, fashion’s introduction of complex models of identity, embodiment and materiality, its foregrounding of clas…
Commodity Feminism and Dressing the 'Best Self' onA Practical Wedding
Fashion as a cultural industry, with its interface between self and social, is laden with potential for interventions in systems of power. Yet its changemaking potential is susceptible to co-optation by neoliberal discourses that harness politics with a commodified, perfectible individuality that superficially counteracts hegemony even as it subtly reinforces it. So much is evident in nominally feminist wedding website A Practical Wedding, which …
Nineteen Funerals”: Ethics of Remembering Murdered Women in a Service Learning Classroom
In the winter of 2010, as the professor of an introductory Gender Studies course in a Canadian university, author Ilya Parkins was involved in a community service learning project centered on the memorialization of women murdered in her university's local community. In this article, Parkins considers what limited this project, which was so promising in its addressing of a need articulated by a community partner, a local women's organization. She …
You’ll Never Regret Going Bold”: The Moods of Wedding Apparel on a Practical Wedding
This paper analyzes textual representations of wedding apparel on popular feminist wedding blog A Practical Wedding (APW). APW’s mediations of wedding clothing harness the transformative dimensions of weddings and wedding apparel. Drawing on the critical literature about moods and the political present, I argue that APW’s discussions of dress that is inclusive of all bodies can be seen as an attempt to instantiate extraordinary moods that depart …
Domesticating enchantment: Mediating feminine magic in the interwar French fashion magazine
This article examines men’s writing about women as vectors of enchantment in three interwar French women’s magazines, La Femme Chic à Paris, Vogue and Gazette du Bon Ton. Such articles appeared frequently, and modernised the ancient discourse of feminine enchantment by locating it in tropes of industrial modernity, including women’s fashion and style. While enchantment is a promising concept for feminist and critical scholars, its representation …
Texturing Visibility: Opaque Femininities and Feminist Modernist Studies
This essay examines women's spectacularly visible status in feminised mass cultural domains in the first decades of the twentieth century. Feminine spectacles are commonly understood to invite viewers to access women's bodies, yet early twentieth-century spectacles paradoxically called renewed attention to women's illegibility. Women's visual prominence made apparent their 'unknowability', recasting an ancient ideational heritage in modern terms.…
Fresh Lipstick: Redressing Fashion and Feminism by Linda M. Scott
(2007). Fresh Lipstick: Redressing Fashion and Feminism by Linda M. Scott. Fashion Theory: Vol. 11, No. 2-3, pp. 365-367
Feminist Witnessing and Social Difference: The Trauma of Heterosexual Otherness in Vera Brittain's Testament of Youth
Building a Feminist Theory of Fashion: Karen Barad's Agential Realism
Fashion as Methodology: Rewriting the time of women’s modernity
Recent feminist scholarship has shown that women's anteriority to 'the modern' - and even to time itself - was a powerful and persistent feature of the temporal imaginary at the height of industrial modernity, from about 1860 to 1940. Neo-Marxist work on the time of modernity, for its part, indicates that the dualistic understanding of temporality that structures the trope of feminine timelessness is marked by instabilities and contradictions. Fa…
Poiret, Dior and Schiaparelli: Fashion, Femininity and Modernity
Through a highly original and detailed analysis of the memoirs, interviews and other life writings of Poiret, Dior and Schiaparelli, this book explores changing notions of femininity in the early decades of the twentieth century, when the democratization of fashion began. Examining the idea of modernity, eternity and the ephemeral in the writings of these haute couturiers, the book reflects on fashion's ambivalent approach to women, which both ce…
The Public Time of Private Space in Dior by Dior
This essay reads the life writing of major French fashion designer Christian Dior as an extended meditation on the challenging relationship between public persona and intimate selfhood for a celebrity fashion designer. Dior works through the tension between public and private by referring it to a complex nexus of space and time; his narration of his life through the lens of his childhood homes suggests not only a spatial orientation but a fraught…
Nineteen Funerals”: Ethics of Remembering Murdered Women in a Service Learning Classroom
In the winter of 2010, as the professor of an introductory Gender Studies course in a Canadian university, author Ilya Parkins was involved in a community service learning project centered on the memorialization of women murdered in her university's local community. In this article, Parkins considers what limited this project, which was so promising in its addressing of a need articulated by a community partner, a local women's organization. She …
Texturing Visibility: Opaque Femininities and Feminist Modernist Studies
This essay examines women's spectacularly visible status in feminised mass cultural domains in the first decades of the twentieth century. Feminine spectacles are commonly understood to invite viewers to access women's bodies, yet early twentieth-century spectacles paradoxically called renewed attention to women's illegibility. Women's visual prominence made apparent their 'unknowability', recasting an ancient ideational heritage in modern terms.…
Hurricane Sandy inVogue: Fashion, Disaster and Urban Neoliberalism
New York Vogue published a photographic feature just over two months after Hurricane Sandy hit the Eastern seaboard of the USA, to commemorate the work of New York City emergency responders in the wake of the disaster. Juxtaposing fashionably clad models with responders, the feature invoked a gendered and classed rhetoric of fashion, crisis, and temporality to create both a memory of the disaster, and a vision of the metropolis and its future. Th…
Domesticating enchantment: Mediating feminine magic in the interwar French fashion magazine
This article examines men’s writing about women as vectors of enchantment in three interwar French women’s magazines, La Femme Chic à Paris, Vogue and Gazette du Bon Ton. Such articles appeared frequently, and modernised the ancient discourse of feminine enchantment by locating it in tropes of industrial modernity, including women’s fashion and style. While enchantment is a promising concept for feminist and critical scholars, its representation …
Introduction: Fashion and Feminist Politics of the Present
This article introduces the special issue on fashion and features an analysis of the current state of the relationship between the fashion system and feminist scholarship. Important points of convergence are identified, including the link between the so-called democratisation of fashion and the recent resurgence of feminism in mass culture, fashion’s introduction of complex models of identity, embodiment and materiality, its foregrounding of clas…
Interview with Reina Lewis
This interview with leading fashion studies scholar Reina Lewis discusses the various foci of her research about fashion and visual culture: orientalism, religion (especially Islam), and queer sexualities. The interview highlights the intersection between these strands of Lewis’s work. Parkins and Lewis discuss what these intersections might reveal about regimes of visibility for differently marginalized groups, historically and in the contempora…
How racialized students navigate campus life in a mid-sized Canadian city: Thrown Against a White Background' but 'Comfortable Enough to Laugh
We studied how racialized students navigate and cope with campus life amidst a context of discrimination in a midsize Canadian city. Using a situational analysis approach informed by participatory action research principles, our analysis revealed two overarching themes: (1) Thrown Against a White Background, representing frequent encounters of White normativity and supremacy often experienced through racially-based social stigma, marginalization …
You’ll Never Regret Going Bold”: The Moods of Wedding Apparel on a Practical Wedding
This paper analyzes textual representations of wedding apparel on popular feminist wedding blog A Practical Wedding (APW). APW’s mediations of wedding clothing harness the transformative dimensions of weddings and wedding apparel. Drawing on the critical literature about moods and the political present, I argue that APW’s discussions of dress that is inclusive of all bodies can be seen as an attempt to instantiate extraordinary moods that depart …
Commodity Feminism and Dressing the 'Best Self' onA Practical Wedding
Fashion as a cultural industry, with its interface between self and social, is laden with potential for interventions in systems of power. Yet its changemaking potential is susceptible to co-optation by neoliberal discourses that harness politics with a commodified, perfectible individuality that superficially counteracts hegemony even as it subtly reinforces it. So much is evident in nominally feminist wedding website A Practical Wedding, which …
Introduction: Theorising Fashion Media
Fashion and Feeling: The Affective Politics of Dress
Fashion and Feeling will explore the complex nexus of fashion and the feeling body from a variety of critical perspectives.
Feminist sentimentalism? Ambivalent feeling in inclusive digital wedding media
This article traces textual sentimentalism on popular, feminist wedding blog A Practical Wedding. In dialogue with Lauren Berlant’s work on sentimentalism as essentially apolitical and with feminist reclamations of the sentimental, it examines whether A Practical Wedding develops a feminist sentimentalism. Juxtaposing two of the blog’s foundational genres, the real wedding feature and the advice column, it excavates the blog’s invocations of the …
Making a Reality: Inclusive Wedding Vendors and Extramarket Morality
This article analyses a series of interviews with queer-positive wedding apparel and style providers. Vendors’ descriptions of their relationships with clients reveal a prioritization of embodied intersubjectivity. We explore vendors’ construction of themselves as providing respite, in the wedding apparel production process, from clients’ repertoire of experiences of exclusion in a hetero- and cisnormative fashion industry. The intercorporeal eth…
Fashion and Feeling: The Affective Politics of Dress
Introduction: ‘Affiliative Fashion, Relational Analysis and Power’
This Special Issue introduction reflects on the tendency, in fashion studies, to focus on fashion and dress mainly as forms of personal expression. We argue that, to counter this trend, fashion studies needs to orient itself to fashion and dress as primarily relational domains, which affiliate wearers and makers with other people, networks and institutions and implicate dress in flows of power. This will enable fashion studies to better realize i…
Sociology (17 works) · Fashion and Cultural Textiles (16 works) · Art (14 works) · Aesthetics (11 works) · Political science (11 works) · Gender Studies (9 works) · Psychology (8 works) · Art, Politics, and Modernism (7 works) · Feminism (7 works) · Gender Studies (7 works)