Viscose 02: Clothes

Issue 2 inverts issue 1’s focus on the immaterial notion of style to instead explore the most material of fashion’s building blocks: clothes Clothes are literally everywhere and cite complicated systems of production, distribution, and exchange on their paths around the world. Still, they never fully reveal their journey or destination, and may often signify little else than their own commodity status, the total genericness of the fashion product.

Bringing together a wide range of artists, thinkers, and writers, the issue sets out to explore clothes as a signifier at once empty and over-burdened: as expressions of desires, people and places, as palimpsests for capitalist production cycles and histories of dressed bodies, and even, as nondescript material debris. While not necessarily foregoing an analysis of the fashion system, we hope to develop a form of fashion criticism that begins – and perhaps ends – with the single garment, that takes the everyday use of clothing objects as an intellectual starting point.

What knowledge can we gather from the studying of fashion objects, be they material or immaterial? What is the difference between clothes and fashion? And to which extent is even “fashion” ever successfully signified by things?

with contributions by:

Nina Beier, Anne-Sophie Berger, Paige K. Bradley, Laura Brown, Pia Camil, Dal Chodha, Victoria Colmegna, Exactitudes, Anna Franceschini, Laura Gardner, Rhonda Liebermann, Eric N. Mack, Kristian Vistrup Madsen, Christian Oldham, Kembra Pfahler, Carl Gustaf Von Platen, Mattia Ruffalo, Tenant of Culture, Torbjorn Rodland, Barbara Sànchez-Kane, Elise Skalvoll Thorenfeldt, Jeppe Ugelvig, Femke de Vries, Issy Wood, Bruno Zhu

Second edition, 2025 
Softcover, 174pp 
215 x 170mm