VISCOSE JOURNAL ISSUE 05: RETAIL

About the productJapanese

A fashion critique magazine launched in 2021 based in New York and Copenhagen. Jeppe Ugelvig, a fashion art scholar and curator, serves as editor-in-chief. Each issue has a specific theme and is published irregularly. Each issue adopts a different book format, proposing thinking that transcends genres, and aims to expand the possibilities of research, production, and criticism in fashion. Refusing to isolate any field, industry, or place, the magazine is aimed at the intellectual fashion community around the world. In addition, by conducting research in collaboration with research institutions and art museums, the magazine continues to publish without advertising.

This fifth issue explores fashion's multifaceted retail spaces and cultures. It places the evolution of shopping in the 20th and 21st centuries at its centre, highlighting the store as a central nexus where community and identity are constantly produced and reconstructed through commerce. It explores the history of projects, often developed with and by artists, that have employed the store as an expression of possibility and discourse, paying particular attention to the role of fashion retail in the politics of urban space.

Retail is a central site of fashion production. It is in stores, shopping malls and online shops that the visceral capitalist economic scope of the fashion product becomes apparent. It is a desire that has been theorized for centuries as commodity fetishism, a magic that is bestowed on objects that enter into a circuit of exchange. For this reason, the store is the setting for fashion's oldest rituals and has become synonymous with capitalist modernity.

Shopping spaces have changed at an accelerating rate over the last century, transforming into shopping malls and department stores, recreating new types of public space composed of increasingly grandiose "architectures of consumption". As a public activity that requires and demands physical space, shopping continues to generate social relations that are deeply political in nature. In other words, gender, class, gentrification, surveillance, police power, and more are all produced and reproduced in commercial spaces.

As a space dedicated to the reproduction of capital, retail requires systems of loss prevention and security, formal or not, built into its physical infrastructure and embodied within its consumers. Retail, however mundane or mundane, can therefore be understood as a site of political contestation, transgression and resistance.

We study retail after various crises and revolutions have been proclaimed: the death of the store, the end of retail, digitalization. Yet brick-and-mortar fashion consumption has endured through multiple eras, changing both its appearance and function to function as a sophisticated branding space in an active experience economy. Retail as we see it today navigates the ever-shifting relationships between contrasting spaces: urban and rural, virtual and invisible, often creating prototype infrastructures that are adopted elsewhere in society.

This book was published with support from Storefront for Architecture, Between Bridges, and others.

Product Information

release date Available now

Part numberGPHT11789W-9788797480205

Specification Softcover / 212p / 260 x 160 mm

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