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Relatively few garments survive from before the eighteenth century, and the history of costume in the preceding centuries must therefore rely to a great extent on literary and visual evidence. This book, the first of its kind, examines Stuart England through the mirror of dress. It argues that both artistic and literary sources can be read and decoded for important information on dress and the way it was perceived in a period of immense political, social, and cultural change. Focusing on the rich visual culture of the seventeenth century, including portraits, engravings, fashion plates, and sculpture, and on literary sources--poetry, drama, essays, sermons--the distinguished historian of dress Aileen Ribeiro creates a fascinating account of Stuart dress and how it both reflected and influenced society. Supported by a wealth of illustrative images, she explores such varied themes as court costumes, the masque, the ways in which political and religious ideologies could be expressed in dress, and the importance of London as a fashion center. This beautiful book is an indispensable and authoritative account of what people wore and how it related to Stuart England’s cultural climate.
This beautifully illustrated book explores the rich complexity of Regency clothing through the lens of the collected writings of Jane Austen.
Covering a variety of genres and periods from medieval epic to contemporary speculative fiction, Styling Texts explores the fascinating ways in which dress performs in literature. Numerous authors have made powerful-even radical-use of clothing and its implications, and the essays collected here demonstrate how scholarly attention to literary fashioning can contribute to a deeper understanding of texts, their contexts, and their innovations. These generative and engaging discussions focus on issues such as fashion and anti-fashion; clothing reform; transvestism; sartorial economics; style and the gaze; transgressive modes; and class, gender, or race "passing." This is the first academic volume to address such an extensive range of texts, inviting consideration of how fashionable desires and concerns not only articulate the aesthetics, subjectivities, and controversies of a given culture, but also communicate across temporal and spatial divisions. Styling Texts is an essential resource for anyone interested in the artistic representations and significations of dress.
Rosy Aindow's interdisciplinary study maps the literary response to the emergence of a modern fashion industry in late nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Britain. The study argues dress is given a distinctive voice in novels of the period; works that embrace older sartorial tropes, but which simultaneously shape and formulate their own reflecting contemporary social concerns.
Dress, Distress and Desire explores representations of sartorial experience in eighteenth-century literature. Batchelor's study brings together for the first time canonical and non-canonical texts including novels, conduct books and women's magazines to investigate the pressures that the growth of the fashion market placed on conceptions of female virtue and propriety. It shows how dress dispelled the sentimental myth that the body acted as a moral index and enabled the women reader to resist some of sentimental literature's more prescriptive advice.
Through the centuries children's clothes have reflected the concerns of parents and shifts in fashion. The needs of the child, changing ideas on health and upbringing, evolving social attitudes and new technology all find expression in their dress.
This text sets out to fill a gap in the existing literature on the ambivalence of fashion and dress by drawing on a wide range of women's experiences with their wardrobes, and providing empirical data.
Rosy Aindow examines the way fiction registered and responded to the emergence of a modern fashion industry during the period 1870-1914. She traces the role played by dress in the formation of literary identities, with specific attention to the way that an engagement with fashionable clothing was understood to be a means of class emulation. The expansion of the fashion industry in the second half of the nineteenth century is generally considered to have had a significant impact on the way in which lower income groups, in particular, encountered clothing: many were able to participate in fashionable consumption for the first time. Remaining alert to the historical specificity of these events,...
Newly avilable in paperback, this major contribution to cultural history is a study of dress in France in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Daniel Roche discusses general approaches to the history of dress, locates the subject within current French historiography and uses a large sample of inventories to explore the differences between the various social classes in the amount they spent and the kind of clothes they wore. His essential argument is that there was a 'vestimentary revolution' in the later eighteenth century as all sections of the population became caught up in the world of fashion and fast-moving consumption.
In this collection of autobiographical writings, Kate Fletcher explores relationships between garments and human embeddedness in nature. Going beyond the idea that nature is a means to human ends, Wild Dress documents how we wear clothes in ways that add weight to and awareness of the natural world. Includes fifteen colour photographs of Macclesfield Forest and the Goyt Valley in the Peak District and Garsdale in the Yorkshire Dales by Charlie Meecham.Kate Fletcher is Professor of Sustainability, Design and Fashion at the University of the Arts London. For more than two decades her work has been at the forefront of the movement for systems change in the fashion sector. She has written and co-edited seven books translated into as many languages.