A Letter from the Editors

Illustration by Mike Thompson

Welcome to the new FSJ!

This site is a labor of love and friendship. Our team has expanded and contracted over the years, and we’ve been lucky to work with so many amazing editors and contributors who represent the present and future of fashion studies. The current team finds ourselves in 2020 facing a lot of uncertainty, like all of you, but committed to making FSJ part of the solution. Our new mission statement — hashed out in many, many video calls and emails threads over the last few months — represents a renewed sense of purpose.

When the pandemic hit, we were teaching in person, working in offices, researching in libraries; then, like all of you, forced to take a step back and reassess what really mattered in our work and our lives. Spread across North America, our team had been meeting remotely for years and were Zoom veterans, but we were afforded the time to make those meetings more regular and to share more about what was really affecting us.

The ensuing social unrest lit a fire under us, like so many of you, and we felt unable to sit idly watching others agitate for change, especially when we have this platform we could be using more actively in a political and anti-racist way. We got to discussing the purpose of fashion studies, the relationship between academia and activism, and the precariousness of our field. We wondered how we could serve our community better.

We determined a collective need for progress — personal, political, academic. We need to explore and expose structural inequalities in our field, and thanks to our unique position adjacent to formal institutions, we have the privilege to facilitate and support conversations that do not fit elsewhere. As editors, this translates to a responsibility to select work we think is most invested in tangible change. We are choosing to focus the editorial mandate of FSJ exclusively on writing and creative work that challenges established hierarchies or questions existing systems. For contributors, this means we seek work that exposes unfairness and structural inequalities, and shares hopeful propositions for rebuilding a more equitable industry/field. 

We’ve re-written our mission statement to reflect these evolving conversations. That being said, the mission is not complete; we aren’t sure yet exactly what it means to be an activist-oriented journal in fashion studies. We know that providing and holding space for difficult, reflective conversations and connection is a good start. We’ve all heard a lot about “doing the work,” and we intend to be a safe, supportive space for you, our fashion studies community, to do so.

Momentum is addictive. We intend to keep working for justice and equity in our corner of the world, and hope you’ll join us.

Warmest,

Lauren, Laura, Sara, Natalie, Olivia, Anthony, and Rachael

While you’re here, we encourage you to take a look at our survey, “Making it Work.” Like our new mission, this was many years and many video calls in the making. The final survey offers an invaluable glimpse into who we are as a community and how we navigate a field that is precarious as it is full of potential. In the coming weeks and months, we will be unpacking and reflecting on the results of this survey and inviting you to do so as well. Watch this space!