Foreword: Fashioning fat

Abstract

ABSTRACT This foreword introduces and situates the articles in the “Fashioning Fat” special issue. The intersection of fat studies and fashion studies is a fruitful and productive one; important scholarship that explores how fat people and fat communities approach fashion continues to inform understandings of fat identity construction and performance. Yet there remains an expansive, and emerging, field of fat fashion studies that offers scholars from a range of disciplinary backgrounds opportunities to deepen and expand those understandings. The six articles in this special issue explore the messy, complicated and constrained relationships between inclusion, liberation, fatness and fashion; they continue existing scholarly conversations and they introduce new ones.