Fashion has always been strongly linked with the politics of gender and equality. In this global and interdisciplinary collection, leading authors explore the relationships between the dressed body, ...fashion, sex, and power, with an emphasis on the role of dress in both reinforcing and challenging social norms. Covering a range of geographic and social contexts, the book explores the role of fashion in empowering both individuals and groups to create transformation and change. Taking us from the performance of black dandyism through stylized hats, to the use of challenging dance forms and male-inspired dress by female South African dancers to express independence and equality, to ways in which recent Bond Girls have challenged traditional gender binaries, the book provides a crucial entry point into discussions of fashion as an empowerment strategy. Fashion, Agency, and Empowerment encourages the reader to critically examine the cultural and social impact of sexual objectification, as well as to consider personal and shared narratives of self-objectification and repression. With chapters ranging from the iconic self-fashioning of Princess Diana to a discussion of sex, power, and cultural constructions of masculinity, Fashion, Agency, and Empowerment provides crucial insights into global fashion, political structures, and social life.
Numerous tastemakers exist in and between fashion production and consumption, from designers and stylists to trend forecasters, buyers, and journalists. How and why are each of these players bound up ...in the creation and dispersion of trends? In what ways are consumers’ relations to trends constructed by these individuals and organizations? This book explores the social significance of trends in the global fashion industry through interviews with these ‘fashion intermediaries’, offering new insights into their influential roles in the setting and shaping of trends. The Trendmakers contains exclusive interviews with financial analysts, creative directors from high street stores like H&M to designer brands such as Erdem, trend forecasters at WGSN, buyers from Harvey Nichols, and major fashion names like The Telegraph fashion critic Hilary Alexander. In contrast to existing research, Lantz offers an international understanding of the trend landscape, engaging with industry professionals from fashion capitals like London, Paris, and New York, as well as BRIC countries and the new, emerging fashion nations. The fashion media may have declared that ‘trends are dead’ in the light of digital dissemination, but Lantz argues that trends still not only serve as a significant organizing principle for the fashion industry as a whole but also as a source for legitimacy. Engaging with classic fashion thinkers like Veblen, Simmel, and Bourdieu, as well as contemporary scholars like Entwistle and Steele, this book considers trends from an economic and cultural perspective to add to our knowledge of the complexities of the business of fashion.
It is broadly recognized that black style had a clear and profound influence on the history of dress in the twentieth century, with black culture and fashion having long been defined as ‘cool’. Yet ...despite this high profile, in-depth explorations of the culture and history of style and dress in the African diaspora are a relatively recent area of enquiry. The Birth of Cool asserts that ‘cool’ is seen as an arbiter of presence, and relates how both iconic and ‘ordinary’ black individuals and groups have marked out their lives through the styling of their bodies. Focusing on counter- and sub-cultural contexts, this book investigates the role of dress in the creation and assertion of black identity. From the gardenia corsage worn by Billie Holiday to the work-wear of female African-Jamaican market traders, through to the home-dressmaking of black Britons in the 1960s, and the meaning of a polo-neck jumper as depicted in a 1934 self-portrait by African-American artist Malvin Gray Johnson, this study looks at the ways in which the diaspora experience is expressed through self-image. Spanning the late nineteenth century to the modern day, the book draws on ready-made and homemade fashion, photographs, paintings and films, published and unpublished biographies and letters from Britain, Jamaica, South Africa, and the United States to consider how personal style statements reflect issues of racial and cultural difference. The Birth of Cool is a powerful exploration of how style and dress both initiate and confirm change, and the ways in which they expresses identity and resistance in black culture.
The idea of fashion under socialism conjures up images of babushka headscarves and black market blue jeans. And yet, as Djurdja Bartlett shows in this groundbreaking book, the socialist East had an ...intimate relationship with fashion. Official antagonism--which cast fashion as frivolous and anti-revolutionary--eventually gave way to grudging acceptance and creeping consumerism. Bartlett outlines three phases in socialist fashion, and illustrates them with abundant images from magazines of the period: postrevolutionary utopian dress, official state-sanctioned socialist fashion, and samizdat-style everyday fashion. Utopian dress, ranging from the geometric abstraction of the constructivists under Bolshevism in the Soviet Union to the no-frills desexualized uniform of a factory worker in Czechoslovakia, reflected the revolutionary urge for a clean break with the past. The highly centralized socialist fashion system, part of Stalinist industrialization, offered official prototypes of high fashion that were never available in stores--mythical images of smart and luxurious dresses that symbolized the economic progress that socialist regimes dreamed of. Everyday fashion, starting in the 1950s, was an unofficial, do-it-yourself enterprise: Western fashions obtained through semiclandestine channels or sewn at home. The state tolerated the demand for Western fashion, promising the burgeoning middle class consumer goods in exchange for political loyalty. Bartlett traces the progress of socialist fashion in the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, East Germany, Poland, and Yugoslavia, drawing on state-sponsored socialist women's magazines, etiquette books, socialist manuals on dress, private archives, and her own interviews with designers, fashion editors, and other key figures. Fashion, she suggests, with all its ephemerality and dynamism, was in perpetual conflict with the socialist regimes' fear of change and need for control. It was, to echo the famous first sentence from the Communist Manifesto, the spectre that haunted socialism until the end.
From artist to curator, couturier to fashion blogger, ‘creative’ professional identities can be viewed as social practices, enacted, performed and negotiated through the media, the public and ...industry. Fashioning Professionals addresses what it means to be a creative professional, historically and in the digital age, as new ways of working and doing business have given rise to new professional identities. Bringing together critical reflections from international researchers, the book spans fashion, design, art, architecture and advertising. It examines both traditional and emergent roles in creative industries, from advertising executives and surrealist artists to mannequin designers, pop stylists, bloggers, makers and design curators. The book reveals how professional identities are continually in a state of fashioning through style, taste, gender and cultural representation, highlighting moments of friction and flux in the creative labour of the global economy. Interweaving critical perspectives from fashion and design history with sociology and cultural theory, Fashioning Professionals addresses a burgeoning area of research as we enter new terrain in fashion and the creative industries.
Stylists have become increasingly influential in shaping fashion imagery. They have moved from the backstage, as unrecognised players, to the frontstage of fashion, becoming celebrated for their ...creative work as image makers for magazines, advertising and fashion designers. Yet little is known about the profession, its diverse incarnations and its aesthetic economy. Featuring contributions from leading experts and stylists, this collection is the first to explore the history, meaning and practice of fashion styling through interviews and historic and present-day case studies.Featuring in-depth contributions from prominent fashion scholars, chapters span historical periods, cultural contexts and theoretical frameworks, employing a range of methodologies in the international case studies upon which they're based. Interspersed with interviews with innovative fashion stylists working today, and drawing on examples from advertising, the catwalk and magazines, this book explores the challenges faced by stylists in a fashion system increasingly shaped by commercial pressures and by growing numbers of collections and seasons.Fashion Stylists is an invaluable resource for students and professionals interested in image-making, the representation of style and fashion, entrepreneurship and the history of fashion professionals.
Indonesian fashion has undergone a period of rapid growth over the last three decades. This book explores how through years of social, political, and cultural upheaval, the country's fashion has ...moved away from "colonial fashion+? and "national dress+? to claim its own distinct identity as contemporary fashion in a global world.With specific reference to women's wear, Contemporary Indonesian Fashion explores the diversity and complexity of the country's sartorial offerings, which weave together local textile traditions like batik and ikat-making with contemporary narratives. The book questions concepts of "tradition+? and "modernity+? in the developing world, taking stock of the elite consumption of luxury brands and the large-scale manufacturing of fast fashion, and introduces us to the rise of new trends such as busana muslim (or "modest wear+?), creating a portrait of a vibrant and growing national and, increasingly, international, industry.Exploring clothing in shopping malls, on the catwalk, in magazines, and online, the book examines how Indonesian fashion is made, presented, and consumed, combining research in Indonesia with analysis and personal reflection. Contemporary Indonesian Fashion ultimately questions the deeply entrenched eurocentrism of "global fashion", simultaneously interrogating current homogenizing beauty and body image discourses posited as universal, by pointing to absences, silences, and erasures as reflected by contemporary Indonesian fashion- hence the "looking glass" of the title. Aptly illustrated, the book offers a new perspective on a rapidly developing new fashion capital, Jakarta.
Contemporary fashion in the Netherlands shows a unique mix of playful individualism, conceptual strength, and organisational innovation. Delft Blue to Denim Blue maps the landscape of Dutch fashion ...in all its rich variety and complexity.Luxuriously illustrated in colour, the book uncovers the cultural roots of Dutch fashion in a globalized context. The authors debunk myths surrounding Dutch fashion, dig up new facts and stories, and explore the creative relation of fashion design to cultural heritage. Written by experts in the field, Delft Blue to Denim Blue gives a rich overview of designers, ranging from G-Star jeans, and affordable retailer C&A, to a savvy brand like Vanilia, and from the famous designer duo Viktor&Rolf to a futuristic designer like Iris van Herpen. The book assesses the diversity of Dutch fashion designers, firms and brands in their historical and cultural contexts.
Letter from the Editor Aliabieva, Liudmila
Fashion theory,
03/2018, Volume:
22, Issue:
2
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
In this issue of Fashion Theory I was faced with the difficult task of selecting just six papers from the hundreds of articles published over the 12 years of Russian Fashion Theory’s existence.
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