Marginal Fashion Publishing: Tactics, Practices, Market Forces

Surveying the dynamic and collaborative activity of marginal fashion publishers of the 1990s onwards for the first time, Laura Gardner explores artistic and critical publishing at the fringes of the commercial system and their impact on the discourse and practice of fashion. Putting these marginal practices at the centre of a discussion on fashion media, she explores their techniques, including makeshift production, parasitic economies, mirror forms, quasi-archives, pseudonymic writing, immaterial and fictional garments. With a focus on artists’ publishing and discourse on publishing in other creative fields, these projects and their radical approaches to production, content and dissemination, are examined in depth. Drawing on interviews and reproductions, this book puts forward fashion’s history and active practice of experimental, performative and counter-cultural publishing, making the case that these projects - despite restrictions of scale, funding and geography - can critique, experiment with, and altogether reimagine the fashion system.