[1] Seeking to contribute to growing scholarship devoted to the relationship between fashion and identity in fan cultures, editors Elizabeth Affuso and Suzanne Scott offer Sartorial Fandom: Fashion, Beauty Culture, and Identity as a provocative compilation. Notably, the editors take care to acknowledge that this collection was originally compiled during the COVID-19 pandemic that impacted the world, which calls for some interesting conversation about the impact of COVID-19 on fan fashion and identity. The authors explore the phenomenon of sartorial fandom in a historical light while diving into various sociocultural influences such as lifestyle branding, fan expression, and embodiment. By first defining "sartorial" as relating to dress and fashion, Affuso and Scott assume an interdisciplinary approach involving methodologies such as textual analysis and ethnography to explore fans' relationships to fashion merchandise, cosplay, and fandom objects made to be worn. While the topics discussed are primarily Western, some essays offer insight into the influence of the Asian marketplace over fans' consumer interests, which bleeds into fashion and beauty trends. Taken further, the essayists address complex issues related to gender, age, race, disability, and body inclusivity within the constraints of consumer capitalism and the fashion industry.
[2] With sixteen extensive chapters, the text is divided into four sections. Those who are well versed in fan studies and fan merchandise may recognize contributors such as Elizabeth Affuso, Suzanne Scott, Avi Santo, E. J. Nielsen and Lori Morimoto, and Rebecca Williams (primarily on fan pilgrimage). As previous contributors to cosplay studies, A. Luxx Mishou (2021) and Nicolle Lamerichs (2018) have demonstrated a wealth of knowledge on gender, cosplay, and identity as well as cosplay and affect, respectively.
[3] In the introductory chapter for this book, Affuso and Scott provide social commentary on how one's wardrobe reflects style and taste from the perspective of both consumers and fans. In setting up the framework for the book, Affuso and Scott draw from preexisting scholarship on taste and subcultures in application to beauty and fashion cultures in order to examine the role that digital culture plays in mainstream and/or subcultural approaches communicating personal style. Fan culture, they claim, is key to analyzing style with respect to mounting societal and cultural tensions revolving around commodification, taste and self-expression, and the subcultural clash with or conformity to hegemonic culture. According to Affuso and Scott, sartorial fandom acknowledges just how interrelated fandom and style are. The book aims to analyze how fans approach fandom and beauty cultures by flaunting unique modes of self-expression through fashion and beauty merchandise, mass-produced objects, cosplay, and more. For example, Nicolle Lamerichs in her chapter on fan fashion related to the science fiction franchise Star Wars scrutinizes the relationship between corporate business models and the construction of fan identity. Fan culture offers a wealth of promise for future research in studying the sociocultural influence of style in negotiation of the contemporary political economy. By exploring the convergence between models of production and consumption, Sartorial Fandom intervenes in fashion discourse and conversations about labor in the context of late consumer capitalism across the globe.
[4] Affuso and Scott address how the anthology is divided into four sections. Section one offers insight into the histories of sartorial fandom. The second section approaches sartorial fandom akin to a business, lifestyle, and/or brand, mobilized by contemporary capitalism. In the third section, fashion is understood as a form of fan expression while examining fans of fashion. Lastly, the fourth section explores what it means to fashion fans' bodies. All four sections touch upon transnational contexts as well as the implications of markers of social difference related to fan identity. Broadly, Sartorial Fandom raises a compelling question: Why do fans embrace dress, costumery, accessories, mass merchandise, and beauty products to convey the sentiment of "What makes me, well, me?"
[5] Part one of the collection offers alternative histories that detail responses to or retaliations against the mainstream beauty and fashion industries through sartorial fan expression such as appealing to female consumers with fan magazines, the reappropriation of the anorak fashion item, and subcultures like steampunk. Kate Fortmueller analyzes fashion columns from 1930s issues of the fan magazine Photoplay to probe fan investment in Hollywood film production. Fortmueller discusses how clothing retailers approached female fandom through fan merchandising in advertisement. Elodie A. Roy explores sartorial culture during the period of United Kingdom Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s where anorak is a subcultural style that resists mainstream fashion, largely discussed in underground fanzines and a series of formal and informal conversations. Continuing within the context of the UK, Samantha Close explores immersion in steampunk at the intersection between Victorian London and popular culture in which steampunk fashion is regarded as a cosplay aesthetic, as a subcultural aesthetic, and as theorized to belonging to its own respective fandom. In sum, this section explores topics of resistance and revolt expressed by way of fashion through a historical lens.
[6] Part two includes significant discussions of the gig economy in which brands, lifestyle branding, neoliberal logics, contemporary retail marketplace, and mainstream influences complicate business discourse related to sartorial fandom. In this section, it is addressed how sartorial fan entrepreneurship—or the fantrepreneur, a term coined by Scott (2019)—tends to be related to women's work or is a deeply gendered phenomenon. To reiterate, Scott refers to the fantrepreneur as someone who self-brands their identity as a fan for the purpose of commodification or as a means to cash in on being a fan as a prospective career. By accounting for the dynamics between the contemporary retail marketplace and branding, Avi Santo studies T-shirt merchandise sold at Hot Topic, a pop-culture and merch store, to discuss how clothing motivates lifestyle branding. Coining the term "curatorial mediation," Santo speculates that Hot Topic's consumer base displays their merchandise to convey personal self-expression yet still falls into the logics of lifestyle branding models through self-promotion. By interviewing independent geek fashion brands, Lauren Boumaroun outlines how these geek fashion brands belong to production culture while addressing the tensions between the gift-culture economy and commodity culture with respect to the unlicensed geek fashion community. Also featured in this section, Nicolle Lamerichs identifies how the story world of the Star Wars franchise is applied to different types of fan fashion through fan embodiment. By examining musician and fictional cult leader Poppy Seed, Paxton C. Haven specifically analyzes Poppy's hyperfeminine style in music videos as a branding phenomenon both resistant yet conforming to patriarchal control in the industry. At the cross-section of race, the hip-hop music genre, and fandom, Alyxandra Vesey examines labor involved in fandorsement work, particularly as it relates to the Savage X Fenty brand where celebrities function as brand ambassadors during affirmational runway shows that represent inclusivity. Ultimately, this section seeks to bridge the gap between the do-it-yourself (DIY) ethos behind sartorial fandom's gig economy and the mainstream fashion industry as it is understood today.
[7] Part three raises the question of how fashion functions as a fan object in the context of fandom. While these objects possess sentimental as well as economic value, the fan identities discussed in this part factor "into larger structural systems of power" that communicate societal and cultural norms and practices related to sartorial fan expressions (9). Accordingly, Elizabeth Affuso approaches masculine fashion subcultures through hypebeast brand communities wherein influencers pursue status in digital spheres to investigate the larger structure of race and masculinity in the global fashion marketplace. While frequently ascribed a feminine label as a cultural assumption, E. J. Nielsen and Lori Morimoto study the purpose of flower crowns for fannibals, or fans of Bryan Fuller's NBC Show Hannibal (2013–15). In their coauthored chapter, Nielsen and Morimoto claim that fannibals' flower crowns function as a type of fan semiotics, fan merchandise, and mode of affective currency where transactional and collaborative relations become increasingly apparent. By examining US products sold on e-commerce platform Etsy, Jacqueline E. Johnson studies how the Harry Potter fandom experiences the gendered constraints of the wedding industry in a complex set of relations through the creation and consumption of Harry Potter–themed bachelorette shirts. Shifting gears from broader contexts of fashionable fan-made objects and consumer identity, A. Luxx Mishou advocates for a deeper investigation of cosplay narratives in questioning the role of identity when researching cosplay. As a cosplayer, Mishou pulls from previous interviews and ethnography to explore the robust motivations articulated within anonymous cosplayer motives while also confronting the policing and gatekeeping prevalent in the cosplay community. Here, the authors in this section attest to the idea that fashion, too, can be studied as a fan object that articulates the complexities of lived identities, either reinforced by the status quo or in active opposition.
[8] Part four explores fan bodies and embodied fan practices wherein the body offers creative avenues for self-expression. The fan body, in this section, is (re)fashioned through instances of cosplay, crossplay, and so on in response to surveillance, transformation, and remediation. Through the context of the fan practice of Disneybounding, Rebecca Williams links the performance of sartorial fandom to the attendance of theme parks by way of how consumption culture is enacted through "embodied experience" (205). To clarify, in Williams's study, unlike cosplay in which cosplayers may wear costumes, Disneybounding is the cultural practice where fans of Disney assemble outfits that are symbolic of a favorite Disney character, attraction, or media. Furthering conversation on the importance of fan embodiment, Minka Stoyanova acknowledges how contested body-type and racial crossplay tends to be, especially through user interaction with the photo-sharing platform Instagram. By applying the framework of cyborg theory to cosplay, Stoyanova notes three levels of hybridization involving the body, the photograph of the cosplay, and social media, which complicates the relationship between the fan body in cosplay and the media object digitized. Continuing to probe social media trends, Tony Tran analyzes the impact of fads in diet culture via the dissemination of YouTube videos that vlog about K-pop diet challenges. In doing so, Tran claims that K-pop diet challenge vlogs offer an impression of how the Hallyu industry and fandoms conceive what bodies might be understood as fashionable. In Tran's chapter, the influence of fashion, celebrity culture, and fandom hold clear sway over the physical fan body in numerous sociocultural contexts. Lastly, Suzanne Scott reads into the role of licensed underwear in fan franchises, specifically with the retail company Underoos as a case study. Scott proposes that fannish underwear and lingerie is worth studying in the realm of sartorial fan expression on account of how even garments conceived of as intimate or as private speak to the expression of fan identity. In this final section, fan embodiment in sartorial modes of expressions complicates the divide between exclusivity and inclusivity. Here, the research is deepened by the incorporation of national contexts in how they shape or remediate the fan body.
[9] Building on the comprehensive framework and analyses presented in Sartorial Fandom, I encourage future research on the relationship between fashion and antifans or antifandom as well as fashion, identity, and the current political environment in the United States. Indeed, Sartorial Fandom represents the political economy's landscape in a post-2020 world. For additional scholarship on cosplay, please consider the anthology Entrepreneurial Cosplay: Creating Identity, Building Identity, Brand and Business Acumen, edited by Elizabeth Gackstetter Nichols, Amy C. Lewis, and Dave Tomczyk (2024), which studies the implications of branding as a cosplay business strategy. For more scholarship on fan fashion, I recommend "Fan Fashion of Multiple Fandoms: An Exploration of Female Science-Fiction and Fantasy Fans' Dress Practices" by Dina Smith, Casey Stannard, and Jenna Tedrick Kuttruff (2021), published in the Journal of Fandom Studies, since the research relates to the social contexts for women who enact labor to wear fan fashion in science fiction and fantasy. Although neither source explicitly engages with the concept of sartorial fandom, the premise is similar due to the notion that fans continue to complicate the producer–consumer divide through physical modes of self-representation.
[10] Overall, Sartorial Fandom presents keen insight into the fraught relationship between neoliberal rhetoric, consumer capitalism, and fan identity through instances of mass-produced merchandise, subcultural motifs, and expressions of individualism presented by what fans wear, flaunt, and embody. The essays closely examine fan identity through the lens of fashion, fandom, and beauty culture. Despite the limitations of more hands-on research imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic, Sartorial Fandom chooses to delve into the impact that digital media has on fannish modes of expression. In this trajectory, perhaps fan studies could benefit from exploring further the role that the global pandemic played in sartorial fandom with respect to fantrepreneurship, consumerism, and representation. Sartorial Fandom is a useful guide for studying the implications of the consumer market in how fans aspire to express themselves. For researchers interested in the relationship between fan identity, the fashion industry, beauty culture, and subculture fandoms, Sartorial Fandom offers a broad spectrum of case studies that complicate the underlying meanings behind what one chooses to wear and how these objects are worn to attest to the pervasive assumption that how we dress as fans matters.