LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

Fashion has been shaped by overarching social, political, and economic systems since its inception. From production and consumption to institutional oppression, these seemingly invisible structures rule how we access, understand, and create fashion. In this issue, we will explore how these various systems impact fashion, while also investigating how fashion itself disrupts or subverts these systematic ideologies.

By reflecting on the past year of immense challenge and change, including the devastation of COVID-19 and the widespread racial reckoning across the world, we take a look at how fashion and systems play a role. This issue explores various aspects of fashion including class, race, and gender while also considering the systems that shape them such as capitalism and power structures. The contributions in the following pages are organized around two themes: the critique and the active resistance of our fashion system. The subtopics covered in this issue include the othered experience, institutionalized memory, and gender and performativity.

As MA Fashion Studies students and staff members of BIAS: The Journal of Fashion Studies, we stand in solidarity and support the issues raised by our contributors. We have a responsibility as fashion scholars to protect one another and combat racism and injustice within the fashion system and within the growing field of fashion studies. It is important that all of us continue to educate ourselves and take meaningful action. We believe that social justice and fashion foster a compelling symbiotic relationship, and we hope this issue acts as a catalyst in dismantling and rethinking the numerous problems within the current fashion system.