Viscose #6

Viscose is the world’s most exciting journal for fashion criticism. Through specially edited thematic issues, each of which re-imagines the format of the journal entirely, Viscose gives space to genre-defying thinking that challenges and expands the possibilities of research, practice, and critique in/of fashion.

This sixth issue is themed Text, exploring ‘fashion as constructed through words, language and writing, and the immense conceptual scope (for exploration, experimentation, and critique) of such a practice.’ Typically format-bending, this edition may be more traditionally bookish but is beautifully produced nonetheless. A scanned and hand-annotated copy of the introduction makes for the front cover, while the back reads as an imaginary facsimile of this issue's covers and spine (were it a beaten up leather book). 

This interplay between reproduction and the aesthetics of writing continues inside, with a number of previously published texts from fashion designers and writers—Elizabeth Hawe's I Say its Spinach (1938); Yohji Yamamoto's My Dear Bomb (2010); Liane Keen's diagrammatic rules for dressing from 1965—scanned and sitting alongside contributions by Dal Chodha, Jamaica Kincaid, Julie Peeters (editor of BILL), Bruno Zhou and more; ‘a milieu of of experimental, fictocritical, and poetic approaches that widen the horizons of fashion and style.’