In this introductory article, we draw on border metaphors to explore the ways in which the authors in this issue highlight fashion and beauty systems’ roles in overlapping and overcoming, as well as sustaining existing hegemonic constructions of identity: gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, nation and globalization. We contend that fashion and beauty systems socially construct, reconstruct, blur, mix and diminish borders, but their elimination may still unfortunately be aspirational, even in the context of global and neo-liberal capitalism.