Critical Studies in Fashion & Beauty
Journal Data
| Type | JOURNAL |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Intellect Ltd. (GB) |
| ISSN | 2040-4417 / 2040-4425 |
| Scopus | 21101037323 |
| Wikidata | Q96703533 |
| OpenAlex | S4210171171 |
| Website | http://www.intellectbooks.co.uk/journals/view-Journal,id=178 |
| Total publications | 20 |
| Coverage period | 2010 - 2026 |
| Country | GB |
| Language | EN |
| Indexing | Scopus indexed |
| Cited by | 3 |
| Impact factor | 0.5 |
| SJR | 0.196 (Q1) |
| SNIP | 0.507 |
| CiteScore | 1.2 |
| h-index | 1 |
| Female authorship share | 92.9% |
This journal focuses on critical studies in fashion and beauty, aligning with cultural studies, gender studies, and the anthropology of material culture. It represents a cognate humanities and social science field with regular anthropological intersection
Visual Arts and Performing Arts · Arts and Humanities (miscellaneous) · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Art, Politics, and Modernism · Asian Culture and Media Studies · Cinema and Media Studies · Consumer Behavior in Brand Consumption and Identification · Crafts, Textile, and Design · Culinary Culture and Tourism
Dressing the diva
This article explores the complex representation of women in the male-dominated universe of the comic book series The Adventures of Tintin , created and illustrated by Hergé, focusing specifically on the opera singer Bianca Castafiore in The Castafiore Emerald (1962–63). In this comic book, Castafiore occupies a role that is neither a straightforward misogynistic caricature nor a feminist hero. Her unusual portrayal positions her as a site of nar…
Dressing à la Turque
Review of: Dressing à la Turque: Ottoman Influence on French Fashion, 1670–1800 , Kendra Van Cleave (2023) Kent, OH: The Kent State University Press, 256 pp., ISBN 978-1-60635-459-9, h/bk, USD 48
Minimizing plastic waste in the beauty industry’s environmental impact
The cosmetics industry is rapidly contributing to unmanageable volumes of plastic waste and expanding the global recycling crisis due to lesser-known factors like consumer behaviour, brand misinformation and legal limitations. After examining the US recycling and legal frameworks, this study makes it clear that cosmetics are inherently at a disadvantage when it comes to recyclability within the country’s broken recycling system. Solutions present…
Titanic & Fashion
Review of: Titanic & Fashion: The Last Dance , Kunstmuseum, The Hague, 27 September 2025–25 January 2026
Afro-Italian fashion through the lens of practice theory
The traditional paradigms of fashion are facing an ongoing process of redefinition driven by the emergence of new markets and new imaginaries. Migration and diasporic movements play a role in this transformation. The case of ‘Made in Italy’ is particularly emblematic in light of the growing contribution of Afro-descendant designers to the Italian fashion scene. Within this context, we observe new cultural intermediaries as well as less visible, s…
Algorithmic masculinities
This article investigates how male bodies in digital beauty culture in China are systematically transformed from subjects to commodified objects. I examine the construction mechanisms and alienation processes inherent in the commodification of masculine embodiment on short-form video platforms. Through a sequential mixed-methods design, I analyse 500 Douyin (TikTok China) videos from 50 male beauty content creators and conduct fifteen in-depth in…
Queer and Trans Fashion Brands
Review of: Queer and Trans Fashion Brands: Resistance and Revolution in the 21st Century , Kelly L. Reddy-Best (2025) London: Bloomsbury, 204 pp., ISBN 978-1-35046-587-9, p/bk, USD 34.95
Potential new brand members
Sororities are social organizations for women at North American universities with codified standards of dress. RushTok, a portmanteau of sorority ‘rush’, or recruitment, and TikTok, refers to a digital sociality on TikTok, where users share videos related to sorority life. It is best known for ‘outfit of the day’ (OOTD) videos, which are typically created by potential new sorority members to share their outfits for each day of sorority recruitmen…
Fashion
Review of: Fashion: New Feminist Essays , Ilya Parkins and Maryanne Dever (eds) (2024) London: Routledge, 149 pp., ISBN 978-1-03283-897-7, p/bk, GBP 35.99
The fashion hydroscape
The article introduces the concept of ‘fashion hydroscape’ as a critical framework for understanding the interdependence between fashion and planetary water systems in an age of ecological disasters. Situated in Italy’s geographically and culturally aquatic context, the article examines how water materially and symbolically shapes textile practices, imaginaries and ecological consequences. Building on Arjun Appadurai’s notion of ‘-scapes’ and Pat…
Catwalk
Review of: Catwalk: The Art of the Fashion Show , Vitra Design Museum, Weil am Rhein, 18 October 2025–15 February 2026 1
The Asian Baby Girl transformation phenomenon on YouTube
Asian Baby Girl (ABG) represents a prominent second-generation Asian American archetype rooted in the 1980s and 1990s, where youth navigated sociopolitical constraints by creating a distinct culture that challenged historical legacies of exclusion and the ‘forever foreign’ portrayal of Asians. Their particular aesthetic has gained prominence among Asian American beauty creators on YouTube within the past five years, particularly through ABG trans…
Reimagining the bleached body
Concerns over skin bleaching in Nigeria’s urban communities range from health risks to cultural and moral objections. Without discounting these issues, this article reframes skin bleaching as a form of dress or body adornment situated within a neo-liberal context that treats the body as both personal expression and a canvas of social values. Ethnographic interviews with young Nigerians reveal that participants primarily bleach to enhance beauty o…
Paul Poiret, La Mode Est Une Fête, Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris, 25 June 2025–11 January 2026
Review of: Paul Poiret, La Mode Est Une Fête , Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris, 25 June 2025–11 January 2026
Thinking through Fashion
Review of: Thinking through Fashion: A Guide to Key Theorists , 2nd ed., Agnes Rocamora and Anneke Smelik (eds) (2025) London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 336 pp., ISBN 978-1-35037-651-9, p/bk, GBP 19.99
Visible and material politics in fashion and beauty
This editorial examines the ambivalent politics of visibility in contemporary fashion and beauty cultures. The contributions to this issue of Critical Studies in Fashion & Beauty demonstrate that visibility is never simply emancipatory. Rather, beauty operates as a deeply political terrain in which racialized and gendered identities are simultaneously expressed, commodified and regulated. Across five case studies – Asian American ‘Asian Baby Girl…
What women want
This article brings Papua New Guinean women’s perspectives on fashion, gender and morality into conversation with questions of colonial histories and global consumerism. The article shows that adherence to social norms is policed by women in the public sphere and that one person’s choices are enmeshed in ideas of responsibility and obligation to others. Increasingly, younger generations of women believe it is an individual woman’s right to wear w…
Je Suis Kim
Perpetuum mobile
In the deregulated, privatized society of consumers, fashion is a perpetuum mobile a self-feeding, self-sustaining, self-propelling and self-invigorating process. This is due to the interaction of two socially prompted urges: the longing to be a part of a greater whole, and the urge for individualism/uniqueness in their turn the effects of the dialectics of security and freedom. Fashion casts lifestyles in the mode of a permanent and principally …
Revisioning the kimono
Whilst the kimonoed woman is an unchanging stereotype of Japanese beauty, this article suggests that due to the interaction of kimono with the processes of globalization (technological and in terms of communication), the kimono continues to metamorphose to meet the needs of its fashionable, urban, contemporary wearers
What women want
This article brings Papua New Guinean women’s perspectives on fashion, gender and morality into conversation with questions of colonial histories and global consumerism. The article shows that adherence to social norms is policed by women in the public sphere and that one person’s choices are enmeshed in ideas of responsibility and obligation to others. Increasingly, younger generations of women believe it is an individual woman’s right to wear w…
Perpetuum mobile
In the deregulated, privatized society of consumers, fashion is a perpetuum mobile a self-feeding, self-sustaining, self-propelling and self-invigorating process. This is due to the interaction of two socially prompted urges: the longing to be a part of a greater whole, and the urge for individualism/uniqueness in their turn the effects of the dialectics of security and freedom. Fashion casts lifestyles in the mode of a permanent and principally …
Revisioning the kimono
Whilst the kimonoed woman is an unchanging stereotype of Japanese beauty, this article suggests that due to the interaction of kimono with the processes of globalization (technological and in terms of communication), the kimono continues to metamorphose to meet the needs of its fashionable, urban, contemporary wearers
Je Suis Kim
What women want
This article brings Papua New Guinean women’s perspectives on fashion, gender and morality into conversation with questions of colonial histories and global consumerism. The article shows that adherence to social norms is policed by women in the public sphere and that one person’s choices are enmeshed in ideas of responsibility and obligation to others. Increasingly, younger generations of women believe it is an individual woman’s right to wear w…
Dressing the diva
This article explores the complex representation of women in the male-dominated universe of the comic book series The Adventures of Tintin , created and illustrated by Hergé, focusing specifically on the opera singer Bianca Castafiore in The Castafiore Emerald (1962–63). In this comic book, Castafiore occupies a role that is neither a straightforward misogynistic caricature nor a feminist hero. Her unusual portrayal positions her as a site of nar…
Dressing à la Turque
Review of: Dressing à la Turque: Ottoman Influence on French Fashion, 1670–1800 , Kendra Van Cleave (2023) Kent, OH: The Kent State University Press, 256 pp., ISBN 978-1-60635-459-9, h/bk, USD 48
Minimizing plastic waste in the beauty industry’s environmental impact
The cosmetics industry is rapidly contributing to unmanageable volumes of plastic waste and expanding the global recycling crisis due to lesser-known factors like consumer behaviour, brand misinformation and legal limitations. After examining the US recycling and legal frameworks, this study makes it clear that cosmetics are inherently at a disadvantage when it comes to recyclability within the country’s broken recycling system. Solutions present…
Titanic & Fashion
Review of: Titanic & Fashion: The Last Dance , Kunstmuseum, The Hague, 27 September 2025–25 January 2026
Afro-Italian fashion through the lens of practice theory
The traditional paradigms of fashion are facing an ongoing process of redefinition driven by the emergence of new markets and new imaginaries. Migration and diasporic movements play a role in this transformation. The case of ‘Made in Italy’ is particularly emblematic in light of the growing contribution of Afro-descendant designers to the Italian fashion scene. Within this context, we observe new cultural intermediaries as well as less visible, s…
Algorithmic masculinities
This article investigates how male bodies in digital beauty culture in China are systematically transformed from subjects to commodified objects. I examine the construction mechanisms and alienation processes inherent in the commodification of masculine embodiment on short-form video platforms. Through a sequential mixed-methods design, I analyse 500 Douyin (TikTok China) videos from 50 male beauty content creators and conduct fifteen in-depth in…
Queer and Trans Fashion Brands
Review of: Queer and Trans Fashion Brands: Resistance and Revolution in the 21st Century , Kelly L. Reddy-Best (2025) London: Bloomsbury, 204 pp., ISBN 978-1-35046-587-9, p/bk, USD 34.95
Potential new brand members
Sororities are social organizations for women at North American universities with codified standards of dress. RushTok, a portmanteau of sorority ‘rush’, or recruitment, and TikTok, refers to a digital sociality on TikTok, where users share videos related to sorority life. It is best known for ‘outfit of the day’ (OOTD) videos, which are typically created by potential new sorority members to share their outfits for each day of sorority recruitmen…
Fashion
Review of: Fashion: New Feminist Essays , Ilya Parkins and Maryanne Dever (eds) (2024) London: Routledge, 149 pp., ISBN 978-1-03283-897-7, p/bk, GBP 35.99
The fashion hydroscape
The article introduces the concept of ‘fashion hydroscape’ as a critical framework for understanding the interdependence between fashion and planetary water systems in an age of ecological disasters. Situated in Italy’s geographically and culturally aquatic context, the article examines how water materially and symbolically shapes textile practices, imaginaries and ecological consequences. Building on Arjun Appadurai’s notion of ‘-scapes’ and Pat…
Catwalk
Review of: Catwalk: The Art of the Fashion Show , Vitra Design Museum, Weil am Rhein, 18 October 2025–15 February 2026 1
The Asian Baby Girl transformation phenomenon on YouTube
Asian Baby Girl (ABG) represents a prominent second-generation Asian American archetype rooted in the 1980s and 1990s, where youth navigated sociopolitical constraints by creating a distinct culture that challenged historical legacies of exclusion and the ‘forever foreign’ portrayal of Asians. Their particular aesthetic has gained prominence among Asian American beauty creators on YouTube within the past five years, particularly through ABG trans…
Reimagining the bleached body
Concerns over skin bleaching in Nigeria’s urban communities range from health risks to cultural and moral objections. Without discounting these issues, this article reframes skin bleaching as a form of dress or body adornment situated within a neo-liberal context that treats the body as both personal expression and a canvas of social values. Ethnographic interviews with young Nigerians reveal that participants primarily bleach to enhance beauty o…
Paul Poiret, La Mode Est Une Fête, Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris, 25 June 2025–11 January 2026
Review of: Paul Poiret, La Mode Est Une Fête , Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris, 25 June 2025–11 January 2026
Thinking through Fashion
Review of: Thinking through Fashion: A Guide to Key Theorists , 2nd ed., Agnes Rocamora and Anneke Smelik (eds) (2025) London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 336 pp., ISBN 978-1-35037-651-9, p/bk, GBP 19.99
Visible and material politics in fashion and beauty
This editorial examines the ambivalent politics of visibility in contemporary fashion and beauty cultures. The contributions to this issue of Critical Studies in Fashion & Beauty demonstrate that visibility is never simply emancipatory. Rather, beauty operates as a deeply political terrain in which racialized and gendered identities are simultaneously expressed, commodified and regulated. Across five case studies – Asian American ‘Asian Baby Girl…