For the last 100 years, from Nosferatu to Nosferatu, vampires have graced screens large and small, dressed in clothing that has become part and parcel of their appeal. From drab gray and black German frock coats to full formal tuxes, from diaphanous gowns to sleek, form-hugging dresses, from haute couture to jeans and leather jackets, and from wing-collared capes to Middle Eastern chadors, vampire fashion is varied and exciting, yet has, to date, received little academic attention.
We aim to address this dearth. To that end we are thrilled to announce that we are currently accepting abstracts for chapters for inclusion in a volume on Fashion and Vampires, under consideration for the Companion Series at Peter Lang, Oxford.
Our collection will examine vampire fashion to find the connections and common threads. We seek to examine how fashion and vampire couture come together, and to ask—and answer—the question: why does vampire fashion matter?
Our goal is to look at vampire fashion from around the world and through the centuries as worn by vampires from Transylvania, Egypt, Germany, Mexico, Detroit, Los Angeles, Paris, London, Staten Island, New Orleans, Budapest, Bad City, New York, Toronto and a myriad other places. We are especially interested in clothing/costume as a way of expressing character and theme in media, and dress as a way of expressing identity in real life, as well as historical, class-based, gendered, and racialized forms of fashion that vampires wear.
While we are looking for the most part at film and TV/streaming vampires, we are also interested in vampires in art, theater, literature, real-life fashion, video games, music, advertising, and other media.
We are accepting abstracts that address any of the following or related subjects. If you don’t see your angle represented here, send your abstract anyway; we are open to a host of possible ways of looking at what vampires wear, why and when, and what we should think about it.
● International vampires — how do clothing choices change based on the vampire’s origin city/country?
● Vampire identity and fashion choices — the clothes make the… vampire
● Clothing as storytelling: vampires’ choices tell their stories
● Formal attire vs. casual
● Vamping/Vamps — sexy vampires/vampires with sex appeal/vampires and vampiric qualities as sex appeal
● The connection of vampires’ clothing to the cultural context in which the film/TV show exists
● Fashion theory, costume theory and/or monster theory in relation to fashion and vampires
● The evolution of female vampires and their clothing choices through a century of vampire films
● The Working (Girl) Vampire: (Byzantium, for example)
● Queerness and clothing/vampires as queer icons
● Dressing for success
● Dressing for seduction
● Why do many vampires hold to their clothing styles that were popular when they were turned, instead of adapting? Which of them adapt, and how does different clothing tell their story?
● Do vampires of different races wear substantively different clothing? Why or why not?
● Vampires and sex/clothing as sexual allure
● Vampires and kink
● Vampires in black and white, or in full, living color
● Are vampires’ clothing choices always gendered?
● Vampire hunters and their trench coats (i.e., Blade, Underworld, Van Helsing, etc.)
● Reflections/mirrors: how do vampires know how they appear to others?
● YA vampires/Teen rebels and their fashion choices
● Vampire fashion in a genre of your choice: horror; porn; comedy; history; young adult; murder mystery; drama; silent film; mockumentary….
● Vampire fashion comparison of two or three films of your choice
● Why Laszlo and Nadja of What We Do In The Shadows care so much about their appearance
● Modern vampires vs. vampires from early films and their clothing similarities/differences
● Do YA-aimed vampires dress differently than “traditional” vampires?
● Instantly recognizable vampire attire or adornments
● Displaced vampires; do vampires hold onto their clothing when they shift locale?
● Fiction/reality overlap
○ vampire bars and acceptable attire
○ Vampire cosplay
○ Vampire LARPs
● Vampires, fashion and music (à la Bowie)
● Vampire fashion on the real-life runway
● How do vampires as fictional characters reflect clothing choices in the world in which their creators live?
● Anything else you can think of that relates to fashion and vampires
Abstracts should be 300 words, and sent as a Word doc (please no PDFs or links to Google Docs) to [email protected] with the subject line “Vampire Fashion Abstract” and your last name. Be sure to name your document with your last name as well. Abstracts should be sent no later than March 15, 2025. Notification of acceptance will be sent no later than March 31, 2025. Full chapters of 5,000-6,000 words will be due early 2026.
Who we are:
Teresa Cutler-Broyles is a film and cultural theorist; a professor of film theory and analysis at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA, and creative non-fiction, film, and food and food history at The Umbra Institute, Perugia Italy; an author of historical novels and kinky, sexy murder mysteries; and a prolific author of popular culture analyses. Her book The Big Top on The Big Screen (Ed.) explores circuses in film, and she has chapters in print on subjects as varied as gender and sexuality in Star Trek, vampires and AIDS in Forever Knight, alien women in Star Trek, children in films from Afghanistan, belly dance as a form of language, body suspension and liminal space in her edited volume Kink and Everyday Life, and upcoming chapters on the connection between green women and evil in Star Trek, excess and evil in three fantasy films for a Caprine Gothic volume, horror in Doctor Who, doppelgangers in Kubrick’s The Shining, the rationality and irrationality of women in the two Cat People films, and more. Her chapter with Lorraine Rumson about vampires, sexuality and fashion titled “Fashioning the Vampire: What to Wear When You’re Undead” was published in late 2024.
Lorraine Rumson is a doctoral candidate in English literature at the Freie Universität Berlin, Germany, where she is about to defend her dissertation, Victorian Jewish Medievalism. She researches Victorian literature, representations of history in media, and sexuality. Her most recent publication, “Would You Like To Have Your Cunt Pricked? Victorian Discourses of Virginity and its Loss” was published in the Journal for the Study of British Cultures in 2024, and her chapter “Night of the Living Fashion Icons: Fashion and Costume in Romero-Era Zombies and their Progeny,” with Teresa Cutler-Broyles, is upcoming in the Palgrave Handbook of the Zombie. Lorraine runs a cycle of queer, kink, and sex-positive events in Berlin. In the late 2000s and early 2010s, she was an original Twilight fangirl.