Abstract
This chapter will argue that fashion has an established relation with pornography whereby certain imaging codes are incorporated into fashion imagery. This practice is often mediated by a heteronormative dimension that re-enforces structures of domination. In contrast to this normative porno-chic, several fashion brands have utilised explicitly sexualised modes of representation that queer fashion’s established porn-chic. Looking at Hood By Air’s collaboration with the website Pornhub, this chapter will discuss several videos uploaded onto the pornographic website by the fashion brand as well the explicit adoption of pornographic rhetoric for the Handkerchief SS17 catwalk show. Through looking at these examples, this chapter will argue that fashion itself can be understood as a body genre that operates through the perpetual and often anxious inscription of the sexual and sexual difference. Utilising the psychoanalytic insight that human sexuality is an impasse rather than a natural “given”, this chapter will explore the way in which the sexual is no natural affair, but as Alenka Zupančič puts it, it is an excess of signification, “a place of radical disorientation”.
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Summers, F. (2023). Non-Norm-(Hard)-Core: Hood by Air’s Porn Archive. In: Mahawatte, R., Willson, J. (eds) Dangerous Bodies. Palgrave Studies in Fashion and the Body. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06208-7_9
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