*CFP* "NEW REFLECTIONS ON FASHIONING IDENTITIES: LIFESTYLE, EMOTIONS AND CELEBRITY CULTURE", UNIVERSITY OF ROEHAMPTON

New Reflections on Fashioning Identities: Lifestyle, Emotions and Celebrity Culture

14 June 2019

University of Roehampton

London, UK.

A one-day symposium supported by the Centre for Research in Film and Audio-VisualCultures (CRFAC), in association with the Fashion, Costume and Visual Cultures(FCVC) Network.

Symposium convened by Dr Theodora Thomadaki, University of Roehampton

Keynote Speakers

Dr Shaun Cole Associate Professor of Fashion at Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton.

Gok Wan Multi-award-winning UK presenter, fashion expert and on-screen consultant.

Gok Wan’s award winning series How To Look Good Naked (Channel 4, 2006-2010) vividly revolutionised the popular terrains of the makeover genre. It pushed the cultural boundaries of the traditional makeover format by facilitating an emotionally rich transformational experience where female participants reflectively engaged with hidden and often unexplored aspects of their inner subjective experiences. For Gok Wan, the way in which ordinary women emotionally perceived their own body imperfections, as well as how they undervalued their self-worth, is what the programme considered important and in need of modifying. Thomadaki (2017) argues that the appearance of the specific format facilitated by Gok Wan in How To Look Good Naked signals an important shift in the makeover frame towards a discourse of the therapeutic, chiming with what has widely been hailed as a particularly ‘therapeutic’ moment in popular culture (Richards, 2004; Richards and Brown, 2011, 2002; Bainbridge and Yates, 2012, 2014; Yates, 2013). Gok Wan’s How To Look Good Naked’s use of fashion/stylistic skills and practices revealed the expert’s capacity to generate creative opportunities, where aspects of the self can emerge through the playful engagement with fashion and makeover objects related to the participant’s inner self-experience. The effectiveness of the How To Look Good Naked practice launched Gok Wan as a powerful celebrity and on-screen fashion consultant who has been recognised for his continued effort in raising emotional awareness for current feminine body related issues and concerns, as well as for introducing ‘feel good’ practices that offer opportunities for self-reflection and self-growth. His empathetic capacity to reflectively engage with his female subjects revealed an important evolution in the makeover frame, where the omnipotent figure of the expert as objective judge was culturally undone.

Ten years on, the Gok Wan phenomenon can be seen to have played a key role in shaping what we understand as ‘therapeutic’ in popular British lifestyle media and makeover culture. This symposium aims to bring together established, early career and emerging scholars and practitioners working in fashion, promotional culture, celebrity studies and lifestyle media to explore current debates on makeover, fashion and lifestyle practices that enable us to bridge the outer and inner word as means of (re)exploring, (re)discovering, and reflecting on the body, self, sexuality and identity.

Topics may include, but are not limited to:

• Makeover culture and self-improvement 
• Reality TV and ordinary celebrities 
• Celebrity, fashion and branding 
• TV, transformation and lifestyle culture 
• Fashion, sexuality and gender performativity 
• Ordinary clothes and fashion objects 
• Social media, editing and consumption practices 
• Clothes, skin and emotional expression 
• [Post]feminism, beauty and the body 
• Psychoanalysis and popular culture

Presenters at the symposium will be encouraged to develop their papers for publication in a number of Intellect journals, including: Film, Fashion and Consumption, Clothing Cultures, Critical Studies in Men’s Fashion, and Queer Studies in Media and Popular Culture. Full list of Intellect journals.

Abstracts of up to 300 words along with a short biography and contact details, should be submitted to Dr Theodora Thomadaki at theodora.thomadaki@roehampton.ac.uk by February 15th, 2019. Notifications will be sent out in early March 2019.