You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Caroline Evans analyses the work of experimental designers, the images of fashion photographers, and the spectacular fashion shows that developed in the final decade of the twentieth century to arrive at a new understanding of fashion's dark side and what it signifies? Drawing on a variety of literary and theoretical perspectives - from Marx to Benjamin - Evans argues that fashion plays a leading role in constructing images and meanings during periods of rapid change. She shows persuasively that fashion stands at the very centre of the contemporary, where it voices some of Western culture's deepest concerns.
A superlative study of the roots of the modern fashion show In the early 20th century, the desire to see clothing in motion flourished on both sides of the Atlantic: models tangoed, slithered, swaggered, and undulated before customers in couture houses and department stores. The Mechanical Smile traces the history of the earliest fashion shows in France and the United States from their origins in the 1880s to 1929, situating them in the context of modernism and the rationalization of the body. Fashion shows came into being concurrently with film, and this book explores the connections between fashion and early cinema, which arguably functioned as what Walter Benjamin called "new velocities"-...
There are many new looks in fashion; here, at last, is a new look at fashion which focuses on the perplexing relationship between women, fashion and femininity: It brings together fashion and semiotics, psychoanalysis and style, interweaving the vocabulary of fashion literature with that of cultural studies and feminist theory. Helmut Newton's flashing model is contrasted with Deborah Tuberville's models of passive resistence, Jean Paul Gaultier's Dervish Bra with Elsa Schiaparelli's Shoe Hat, the cultural terrorism of punk in the 1970s with the postmodern bedlam of fashion in the 1980s. Analysing fashion at a level of representation, concerned more with images and ideas than with cut and fit, the authors make a series of sorties into fashion photography, design and cultural history, with centre around women, their bodies, and the pleasures and pains of fashion. An examination of attitudes to fashion in the early Women's Liberation Movement is followed by an analysis of how femininity has been appropriated and re-appropriated by women in the urban styles and subcultures of the 1970s and 1980s.
"Recent experimental fashion has a dark side, a preoccupation with representations of death, trauma, alientation, and decay. This ... book looks closely at this strand of fashion design in the 1990s, exploring what its disturbing themes tell us about consumer culture and contemporary anxieties ... Fashion at the Edge considers a range of cutting-edge contemporary fashion in ... depth and detail, including the works of such current designers as John Galliano, Alexander McQueen, Hussein Chalayan, Viktor and Rolf and Martin Margiela"--Cover.
Few phenomena embody the notion of time as well as fashion. Fast-moving and rooted in the 'now', it's constantly creating its own past through the process of rapid style change. Uniquely poised between the past and the future, fashion's relationship with time is unorthodox. Rather than considering time in the conventional sense, this anthology explores three alternative ways to think about fashion and time: the first identifies the seasonal nature of fashion as an industry, and shows how this has impacted on workers and wearers alike. The second looks at fashion design as a ceaseless process of adaptation, reconstruction and recombination of motifs, in which nostalgia and revivals play their...
The first major overview of the duo's career. Includes 200 images by such renowned photographers as Herb Ritts and Juergen Teller.
"This book tests the very definition of modernity and enhances our understanding of the role of fashion in the modern world. From top hats to locomotives, dresses to retail outlets, fashion is a prism through which modernity reflects and refracts. Breward and Evans bring together an organic collaboration of voices on this subject. The collection ranges from such topics as James Morrison (1789-1857), the Napoleon of Shopkeepers to dress in the Stuart era The Mannequin Parade, 1900-1925 and clothing the London actress (1860-1914). From the relationship between clothing and forensic sciences, to the play of performance, parasexuality, and the celebrity, Fashion and Modernity offers an enlightening look at fashion and the modern age." http://www.loc.gov/catdir/description/hol053/2004023161.html.
Every year, American universities publish glowing reports stating their commitment to diversity, often showing statistics of female hires as proof of success. Yet, although women make up increasing numbers of graduate students, graduate degree recipients, and even new hires, academic life remains overwhelming a man's world. The reality that the statistics fail to highlight is that the presence of women, specifically those with children, in the ranks of tenured faculty has not increased in a generation. Further, those women who do achieve tenure track placement tend to report slow advancement, income disparity, and lack of job satisfaction compared to their male colleagues. Amid these disadva...
A directory of edible seaweeds and 100 nutritious, delicious recipes from the Cornish Seaweed Company.
Shortlisted for the Pigott Poetry Prize 2022 A Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year 2021 A Sunday Independent (Ireland) Book of the Year 2021 Martina Evans's eponymous Mules are shoes brought to her as an exotic gift by an American relation. They suggest to her the possibility of a very different world, one which the poems' speakers set out to explore. As happens often in her poems, new and invented experiences throw into relief Evans's own intensely lived experiences: the radiography units of hospitals and their merciless work culture, in which the speakers must survive; a London densely populated by human and animal characters whose colours and aspect she brilliantly evokes. And we r...