Viscose Journal is a journal for fashion criticism, published 'irregularly' and with the support of research and trade organisations around the globe to share knowledge, news and to bring just a little more fun to the subject.
Conceived to provide a useful intersection between art, fashion, literature and academia chiefly via themed critical writing and projects by a range of international contributors, the journal is physically produced as a shapeshifting object variously appearing as a handbag, a Chinese fan and currently as an open book with scribbled notations. The sixth issue of Viscose focuses on fashion as constructed through words, language and writing and delves into the aesthetic and critical effects of 'writing fashion' in and outside of fashion industries.
About Issue 9, 'Japan', from the publisher:
The ninth issue of Viscose investigates a single context of fashion production: Japan. Rather than approaching Japan as a delineated geography, we set out to explore Japanese fashion industries, systems, and knowledges in their full transnational potential.
“Japan” is a perfect object for fashion study insofar as fashion, as a consumer-capitalist and transnational system of style, is itself partially Japanese. With the Meiji Restoration of 1868, Japan concluded its feudal period and rapidly industrialized its consumer systems in parallel with those of the West, with which it interacted both structurally and formally from the get-go. Through Japanese historical concepts such as moga girls (モダンガール), the great drama of capitalist fashion modernity as it interacts with the body—and with the built environment—plays out in full galore, and does so with a crucial emphasis on commodity import/export. Indeed, which style objects enter—and leave—Japan, a proud island nation with a long imperial history, forms the central dialectic of Japanese culture as it negotiates the forces and possibilities of a globalizing world.
This dynamic has continued far into Japan’s post-imperial era (1947–) and continues to play out today as a global system of images and objects, workers and consumers. Even as its economic power has waned, Japan remains a cultural superpower. This has slowly rendered it a reified archival object: a dust-covered but intensely alluring diamond from a near-forgotten era. The renewed hype around Japanese vintage clothing, the surge of tourism—millions of visitors seeking out the nation as a kind of Disneyland lost in translation, a heritage frozen in time—make this clear.
With a particular focus on the 1990s as our starting point, our inquiry moves outward—through professional networks, friendships, and archives—to much earlier periods, as well as to the present. In making this issue, our instinct was to uncover the lesser-known, deeply social histories of Japanese fashion production. In doing so, we ultimately hope to challenge our readers’ assumptions about what qualifies (as) “Japan”—as an idea, a place, a network, and an image—at all.
