IntroductionDespite the recent reinvigoration and high visibility of designer fashion in the world media, there is surprisingly little academic literature examining designer fashion and cities in the context of globalization. The broader literature on fashion and cities tends to focus on how fashion factors into themes of urban renewal (for example, Crewe and Beaverstock, 1998;Crewe and Lowe, 1996;Scott, 1995;1996) and/or of the historical development of fashion spaces and cosmopolitan identities in urban centres (Breward, 1999;Mort, 1998). Only recently have analyses of globalizing economic processes, cities, and designer fashion come together, reflecting, in part, growing interest in the cultural industries as a whole (see, for example, McRobbie,

This visual essay offers a perspective designed to extend and complicate the dialogue surrounding rural fashion through a consideration of just one of the spaces it (recognizably) inhabits. As a case study, the spectacle of Badminton Horse Trials provides a multitude of associations: an internationally renowned sporting event, geographically and culturally located within the English countryside; an affiliated and substantial ‘pop-up’ shopping village, which makes the Trials a retail and fashion event as much as an equestrian event; a landscape setting that supports a temporarily constructed space, embracing aspects of both the rural and the urban(e); and a frame/stage for a series of socially codified interactions informed by dress and communicated through visible appearance and self-presentation. The combination of word and image presented here invites interrogation of the field of fashion and the overlapping contingencies of visual/verbal communication, with a view towards opening up a discourse within fashion to a wider theoretical and practice-led visual community.

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Despite an acknowledgement that, historically, the relationship between horseracing, women and fashion was important, existing literature provides little detail on the actual clothes that women wore as race-goers. The aim of this article is to add missing depth on the clothing of fashionable women at horseraces, focusing on the United States during the interwar period. In so doing, the discussion extends understandings of the history, and the material culture, of sporting spectatorship more generally. The article also introduces original work on the male spectator and his race-going wardrobe. Climatic considerations to do with dressing appropriately for the great outdoors are discussed along with other influential factors on spectator dress such as contemporary fashion journalism and photography. The industry supplying fashion consumers was in transition at this time also and New York acquired prominence as a centre for a new mode of sporty, all-American, fashion that was termed 'sportswear'. As well as dealing with the clothes and the individuals who wore them, then, the article tells the story of the broader socioeconomic conditions of American fashion, sport and sportswear that formedand informed-their wearing.

British fashion is characterized by oppositions: punk versus pageantry, anarchy versus monarchy, Cool Britannia versus Rule Britannia. Why has British fashion come to be so contradictory? How are these contradictions employed to ‘sell British’? What do they mean for consumers who ‘buy British’? Through an examination of iconic fashion companies Paul Smith and Mulberry, The National Fabric provides telling insights into the culture of contemporary fashion and the dilemmas of ‘going global’. Goodrum argues that ‘Britishness‘ is characterized less through a particular look than through its ambiguities. She shows how the apparently straightforward and economically-driven process of globalizing British fashion is, in fact, far more culturally nuanced and locally embedded than has previously been suggested. In examining the interplay between fashion and Britishness, Goodrum redresses a longstanding omission in fashion theory, which has been preoccupied with class, gender and race rather than with national identity.