The fashion press has long played a powerful role as one of the most important primary sources for fashion history in the West. This article argues that the popular fashion history of the post-war decades is written in a methodological field that can be characterized as a hybrid: in-between the practices of journalistic writing and academic research, as well as curating, teaching, etc. The history of fashion in twentieth-century Sweden has in general not been particularly well known or documented, which may have contributed to make the field of fashion literature particularly open to influences from media, popular culture and international publishing. The object of this article is to propose a methodological examination of this frequently neglected group of fashion publications, with a particular emphasis on the illustrations. Inspired by a print culture perspective, popular fashion history and theory books are considered both as material objects and vehicles of ideas, texts and images. The focus on the situation in Sweden offers a perspective from the geographical margins of a conventional fashion history narrative.

This discussion between nine curators, theorists and art historians addresses some of the contemporary issues related to feminism and curating. Topics include the role of the geographical and geopolitical in curatorial projects; the place of canons and canon-making in feminist approaches; the nature of contemporary feminist collectivities; the importance of the museum and its context of capitalism within politicized curatorial practice; and the status of the object and aesthetics in feminist-oriented curatorial practice.

Fashion is both a material product and a feature of the imagination. The way in which it is visualized, disseminated and distributed through representations is central to its social impact and influence across time and place. A study of print culture as it relates to fashion also requires the type of detailed understandings of the producers and reading publics for eighteenth-century periodicals and earlier forms of print. Yet the study of the construction and dissemination of the first fashion magazines is still little understood. Much has to be learned regarding the consumption of print culture generally as it pertains to fashion. What was the relationship between publishers, writers and illustrators of the fashion design press in France, England and Sweden? Who provided the narrative structure and imaginary settings of these magazines that continue to animate contemporary advertising today? How did the transmission of ideas in print work in practice?

The dominance of an English-French dialogue about fashion is not just a product of the dominance of contemporary Western European foci in cultural history, in part a product of the languages that were taught in schools and colleges until recently. Even in the 18th century, fashion was often discussed as a type of dialogue between France and England. The eighteenth-century periodical Cabinet des Modes was itself positioned as a type of dialogue between England and France, suggesting that fashion derived from these two principal fashion capitals. Indeed, it changed its name at one stage to Magasin des Modes Nouvelles Françaises et Anglaises, allowing both a pictorial and a rhetorical dialogue to take place on the page, and inserting both countries into a cosmopolitan circuit ideas and of exchange. How then can we narrate the story of fashionability in countries other than France and England, what can be learned from national collections and foreign language texts than remain poorly accessed outside those countries?

This special issue of the KT publishes findings related to the HERA funded project ‘Fashioning the Early Modern 1500-1800’ and the portfolio to be managed by McNeil and Dr Patrik Steorn, its post-doctoral researcher, ‘Print Culture and Fashion Products’. Editors' Introduction plus 9 articles; 8 in English and 1 in French.