Refereed Contributions by Nathaniel Weiner
International Journal of Fashion Studies, 2019
Members of online menswear communities spend their leisure time engaged in extensive textual dis... more Members of online menswear communities spend their leisure time engaged in extensive textual discussions of menswear. This article presents some of the findings from a study of these online menswear communities. It is based on an online ethnography of six online menswear forums and 51 in-depth interviews with men from Britain, Canada and the United States who use them. It details how the research participants , despite their passion for clothing, produced a rhetorical distance between style and fashion. Fashion was rejected in favour of what was described as 'classic menswear', 'style', 'timeless style' or simply 'clothes'. This was a productive critique of fashion's temporality, with online menswear communities offering a more democratic , inclusive and participatory alternative to men's fashion. However, this rejection of fashion also reflected the persistent gendering of fashion. As spaces for the discussion of clothing, as opposed to fashion, online menswear communities allowed men to enjoy clothes and consumption without their masculinity being tainted by fashion's associations with femininity.
Punk & Post-Punk, 2018
In 2013, the Metropolitan Museum hosted an exhibition of punk-inspired fashion entitled Punk: Cha... more In 2013, the Metropolitan Museum hosted an exhibition of punk-inspired fashion entitled Punk: Chaos to Couture. The exhibition emphasized the 'spectacular' elements of the subculture, reflecting a narrative that dominates accounts of punk dress, whereby it is presented as a site of art school creativity and disjuncture with the past. This is an important aspect of punk dress, but photos of bands and audiences reveal that there was much more to British punk style in the 1970s than what was being sold on London's King's Road. Heeding calls to trouble the boundary between the spectacular and the ordinary in subculture studies, this article looks at the ordinariness of 1970s British punk dress, arguing that we should understand punk dress in terms of mass-market commodities, not just customization and designer fashion. Many of these commodities were worn by the skinheads who preceded punk, and this article explores this subcultural continuity by focusing on the role of the Dr. Marten boot and the Harrington jacket in first-and second-wave British punk dress. It does so through discussion of the Cockney Rejects, the 1979 BBC television dramatization of the Sham 69 album That's Life and the Undertones.
Men and Masculinities, 2019
This article analyzes the sartorial biographies of four Canadian men to explore how the suit is u... more This article analyzes the sartorial biographies of four Canadian men to explore how the suit is understood and embodied in everyday life. Each of these men varied in their subject positions-body shape, ethnicity, age, and gender identity-which allowed us to look at the influence of men's intersectional identities on their relationship with their suits. The men in our research all understood the suit according to its most common representation in popular culture: a symbol of hegemonic masculinity. While they wore the suit to embody hegemonic masculine configurations of practice-power, status, and rationality-most of these men were simultaneously marginalized by the gender hierarchy. We explain this disjuncture by using the concept of hybrid masculinity and illustrate that changes in the style of hege-monic masculinity leave its substance intact. Our findings expand thinking about hybrid masculinity by revealing the ways subordinated masculinities appropriate and reinforce hegemonic masculinity.
European Journal of Cultural Studies, 2018
Film scholars have argued that the British social realist films of the late 1950s and early 1960s... more Film scholars have argued that the British social realist films of the late 1950s and early 1960s reflect the concerns articulated by British cultural studies during the same period. This article looks at how the social realist films of the 1970s and early 1980s similarly reflect the concerns of British cultural studies scholarship produced by the University of Birmingham’s Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies during the 1970s. It argues that the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies’ approach to stylised working-class youth subcultures is echoed in the portrayal of youth subcultures in the social realist films Pressure (1976), Bloody Kids (1979), Babylon (1980) and Made in Britain (1982). This article explores the ways in which these films show us both the strengths and weaknesses of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies’ work on subcultures.
TEM 2014: Proceedings of the technology and emerging media track, online, 2015
This paper examines how the online auction site eBay reflects both the commodified nature of the ... more This paper examines how the online auction site eBay reflects both the commodified nature of the internet and the medium’s communitarian and participatory character. Making a case for the participatory potential of consumer culture, I suggest that in eBay’s case, commodification does not necessarily preclude participation. I describe eBay’s customer support boards and feedback system in relation to the internet’s communitarian values and describe eBay’s auction pages in terms of the internet’s participatory culture. The second section of this paper is comprised of a case study of two liminal sections of eBay where non-normative retail transactions take place. Through a qualitative observation of eBay auctions for white power music and gay ‘scally’ clothing, I argue that these can be best understood in terms of Michel Foucault (1998)’s notion of ‘heterotopia.’
TranscUlturAl, 2014
The button-down shirt is an icon of at least two nationally-determined fashion traditions: The Un... more The button-down shirt is an icon of at least two nationally-determined fashion traditions: The United States' ostensibly upper-class Ivy League style and Britain's ostensibly working-class subcultural street style. This article explores how the button-down shirt has been translated in these different national contexts. I will use Roland Barthes' notion of 'fashion narrative' to elucidate the close relationship between the button-down shirt and the 'national imaginaries' of the United States and Britain. I will first discuss the origins of these two fashion narratives and explore the links between them. To illustrate the lasting impact of these fashion narratives, I will then compare the modern-day publicity materials of two shirt companies closely associated with the button-down shirt in their respective national contexts. PHOTO 1 Caption: An original Troy Guild (a 1960s campus competitor of Gant, much sought-after by collectors of the Ivy Look)
Catwalk: The Journal of Fashion, Beauty and Style,, 2013
Fashion commodities played a key role in the construction of Mod subcultural identities during th... more Fashion commodities played a key role in the construction of Mod subcultural identities during the 1960s, but how do we account for the fact that individuals continue to employ similar commodities to construct subcultural looks five decades later? This paper investigates how present-day members of the Mod subculture engage with fashion commodities, employing virtual ethnography to study an online forum for Mods referred to as ‘Modforum.’ I engage with debates in the study of subculture, arguing that while the age and class make-up of the contemporary Mod subculture differs greatly from that postulated in the 1970s by the researchers at University of Birmingham’s Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, the continued commitment of contemporary ‘Mod Men’ to an authentic subcultural style means that this group cannot be characterised as post-subcultural. I make the case for adapting the literary and queer studies scholar Judith Halberstam’s notion of ‘queer time,’ devising the term ‘subcultural time’ to conceptualise the way in which subcultural participation extends beyond youth for contemporary members of the Mod subculture. I describe how the quest for the ‘right’ garments, those that accurately reproduce not just the appearance but the ethereal essence of Mod, characterises the online discussions of this predominantly male and heterosexual subculture. Furthermore, the centrality of online shopping to the Mod subcultural experience intensifies the postmodern blurring of the lines between leisure and consumption. As consumption of fashion commodities moves from the street to the screen, so too does the display of subcultural stylisation, and I explore contemporary Mods’ mediated display of subcultural outfits. The disjuncture between these practices and dominant notions of masculinity is interpreted by way of the cultural historian Frank Mort’s concept of the ‘homosocial gaze’ and the sociologist Sean Nixon’s dual-articulation of ‘the look.’
Book Reviews by Nathaniel Weiner
Weiner, N. (2014). Review of the exhibition Punk: Chaos to couture, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY. Catwalk: The Journal of Fashion, Beauty and Style, 3(1), 101-106.
Weiner, N. (2013). Review of the exhibition Ivy style, The Museum at FIT, New York, NY. Catwalk: The Journal of Fashion, Beauty and Style, 1(2), 96-100.
Weiner, N. (2013). Review of the exhibition Someday all the adults will die: Punk graphics 1971-1984, the Hayward Gallery, London (UK) and the book Punk: an aesthetic, by J. Savage, W. Gibson & L. Sterling. Punk & Post-Punk, 2(1), 107-110.
Conference Presentations by Nathaniel Weiner
Weiner, N. (2014, July). Digital pilgrimages to the commodity fetish - Online menswear stores and the re-enchantment of the commodity. Paper presented at the International Conference Crossroads in Cultural Studies, Tampere, Finland.
Weiner, N. (2014, May). Men’s online fashion culture, there-enchantment of the commodity, and the ‘pilgrimage to the commodity fetish’. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Canadian Comparative Literature Association, St. Catherines, ON.
Weiner, N. (2014, May). The digital culture of eBay: Friction-free capitalism in a consumer heterotopia. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Canadian Communication Association, St. Catherines, ON.
Weiner, N. (2014, May). British Cultural Studies on screen: Pressure, Babylon, Bloody Kids and Made in Britain. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Film Studies Association of Canada, St. Catherines, ON.
Weiner, N. (2014, March). All dressed up with nowhere to go? - Fashion cities in men's online fashion culture. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association, New York.
Weiner, N. (2014, January). Transatlantic journeys of the button-down shirt: Fashion, nation and subculture. Paper presented at the biannual meeting of the Canadian Association of Cultural Studies, Waterloo, ON.
Weiner, N. (2013, July). Advertising, affluence and abundance; Post-war radio consumption in Canada, 1945-1956. Paper at the Radio Conference: a Transnational Forum 2013, London, UK.
Weiner, N. (2013, June). Fashion, Film and Subculture: The Button-Down Shirt. Paper presented at the Fourth Annual Film and Media Conference, London, UK.
Weiner, N. (2013, April). Fashion narratives of the button-down shirt in Britain and America. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association, Toronto, ON.
Weiner, N. (2012, September). From street fashion to screen fashion – Fashion commodities and masculinity in the contemporary Mod subculture. Paper presented at the 4th Global Conference on Fashion (Exploring Critical Issues), Oxford, UK.
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Refereed Contributions by Nathaniel Weiner
Book Reviews by Nathaniel Weiner
Conference Presentations by Nathaniel Weiner