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UAL Research Online

Russh and the All-Australian Girl?

Findlay, Rosie (2020) Russh and the All-Australian Girl? Feminist Theory. ISSN 1741-2773

Type of Research: Article
Creators: Findlay, Rosie
Description:

A central preoccupation that constantly arises in Australian culture is the question of who “we” are and where “we” belong. So much is evident in independent women’s fashion magazine Russh, the focus of this article, in which pride and uncertainty about Australian identity (and fashionability) are representationally resolved through a sensual, girlish and white fashionable ideal. By closely analysing magazine issues selected from its archive, this article charts the ways that Russh imagines Australian fashion as both imbricated with global flows as well as reaching from the periphery towards where fashion really originates. It then reads the fashionable femininity represented in the magazine in light of settler colonial fantasies that imagined the actualisation of national character amongst the Australian landscape: a landscape in which white presence is positioned as originary. This fashionable ideal symbolically rejects cosmopolitanism through her ‘return to the bush’ whilst embodying fashion itself, thus reconciling the tension between far and near. As such, RUSSH can be read as actively reinforcing a hegemonic Australian imaginary that elides the diversity of contemporary Australian culture/s whilst escaping censure, because as a niche fashion magazine peopled with dreamy protagonists, its content is situated firmly within the realm of fashion’s fantasy.

Official Website: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/14647001221085911
Keywords/subjects not otherwise listed: Whiteness, fashionable ideal
Publisher/Broadcaster/Company: SAGE
Your affiliations with UAL: Colleges > London College of Fashion
Research Groups > Fashion Mediation
Date: 24 March 2020
Digital Object Identifier: 10.1177/14647001221085911
Date Deposited: 11 Mar 2021 15:30
Last Modified: 09 Nov 2023 04:47
Item ID: 16593
URI: https://ualresearchonline.arts.ac.uk/id/eprint/16593

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