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This chapter discusses avant-garde Japanese fashion and the countercultural use of the body as a critical site of resistance in Japan. Focusing on the young Japanese designers who turned against a homogeneous, collectivist culture to create various subcultures by using style as a social statement in the 1970s, this chapter presents the popular kawaii culture as a colourful and fluffy protest against the humdrum, everyday life of the corporate employees (sararīman) working for Japanese conglomerates, who represented the values and norms of Japanese society in the 1970s. Alongside this protest, this chapter also presents the deconstructive fashion of the Comme des Garçons company and its designer, Rei Kawakubo. As of the 1970s, Kawakubo engaged with the politics of the body and identity and countered the aesthetic discourse and repressive values imposed by the fashion world through dress patterns and fashion photographs that presented women with an imaginary ‘ideal’ body. These two oppositional fashion statements challenged different power hierarchies (in Japanese society and in the fashion world), while addressing issues of class and gender.

This chapter focuses on the Islamic fashion industry and how some women have adopted fashion as an expression of individuality or as a strategy of resistance toward conservative interpretations of Islam. It examines criticisms against veiling fashions, particularly by conservative Muslims who view the very idea of Muslim fashion as a threat to the practices of devotion and to Islamic core values. It first traces the history of the Islamic fashion industry and the rise of the Muslim middle class before turning to the shopping habits of Muslim women with regards to fashion. It then considers the way Euro-American fashion designers adapt to Islamic fashion; the emergence of fashion design in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia; and Muslim and Middle Eastern designers' development of their own fashion lines, brands, and styles. It also looks at other fashion-related trends that target Muslim women, from swimwear and hair salons to fashion shows, fashion magazines, beauty pageants, and Muslim dolls.

This chapter examines the cultural and aesthetic transformations of fashion in modern Japan. It begins with a discussion of Meiji Japan’s adoption of Western notions, innovation, and aesthetics, particularly Western dress. It then considers how Japanese fashion designers such as Issey Miyake, Rei Kawakubo, and Yohji Yamamoto redefined and transformed the aesthetics and definition of fashion in the later twentieth century. It also explores the backlash against Western dress and influence; how dress and appearance became a primary way for journalistic critics to attack the government; the emergence of department stores (depaato) selling all sorts of women’s apparel; the Europeans’ embrace of “Japonisme”; and fashion design during the age of modernism (Taishō (1912–1926) and Shōwa (1926–1989) periods). The chapter concludes by profiling a group of individuals who placed Japanese design at the forefront of avant-garde fashion, namely: Hanae Mori, Kenzo Takada, Kansai Yamamoto, Issey Miyake, Yohji Yamamoto, and Rei Kawakubo.

This chapter examines three culturally specific and generation-specific thematic fiters or screens that have been used by many contemporary Japanese artists engaged in social commentary: bodily transformation (henshin) through costuming, makeup, or computer manipulation; performance (engi), including role playing and identity reification; and the depiction of fantasy worlds in animation (anime) and the comic book (manga). The chapter begins with a discussion of the so-called “low art” that became pervasive in Japan in the 1950s in the form of comic books and animated films. It then considers the emergence of Japanese fashion designers, namely Issey Miyake and Rei Kawakubo, who radically altered the body through their rejection of traditional modes of clothing design in favor of new shapes and styles that more closely resembled architecture. It also explores the use of henshin, fantasy, and myth as a filter through which the West was to be translated and Japan was to be understood. Finally, it looks at artists associated with the neo-pop movement but are producing images under the rubric of self-contained pop.

Throughout his voluminous writings, Marx insisted on the notion of capitalism as a turbulent scene of production and exchange, gripped by the forces of competition in an endless process of self-transformation. In these circumstances, every firm faces a stark choice between the continual need to upgrade its process and product configurations or eventually going out of business. The result is what Schumpeter (1942), in an explicit invocation of Marx, called ‘creative destruction’, that is, the periodic abandonment of old equipment, production methods, and product designs in favour of newer and more economically performative assets. At the same time, as both Marx and Schumpeter recognized, creative destruction is inscribed within an ever-expanding sphere of economic activity due to the growth of existing firms, the extension of entrepreneurship, and the appearance of new products on final markets. Capitalism, in brief, is a complex Weld of forces spurring constant qualitative and quantitative readjustments across all its multiple dimensions of operation (cf. Baumol 2002). Sometimes these readjustments are of cataclysmic proportions, as when steam replaced water-power in the nineteenth century; more often than not, as Rosenberg (1982) points out, they take the form of small, incremental steps, many of which may be minuscule, but which collectively produce the incessant instability descried by Marx and Schumpeter. Of late years, there has been a considerable outpouring of literature devoted to these themes, much of it partaking of institutionalist and evolutionary economic theory (e.g. Archibugi et al. 1999; Arthur 1990; David 1985; Edquist 1997; Foray and Lundvall 1996; Freeman 1995; Lundvall and Johnson 1994; Nelson 1993; Von Hippel 1988). An important aspect of this literature is the emphasis that much of it assigns to geography—and above all to the region—as an active force in moulding industrial performance qua new firm formation, learning, invention, and growth (cf. Acs et al. 2002; Antonelli 2003; Audretsch and Feldman 1996; Cooke and Morgan 1998; Feldman 1994; Howells 1999; Maskell and Malmberg 1999; Oinas and Malecki 1999; Simmie 2003; Storper 1995).