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Shortlisted for the Association of Dress Historians Book of the Year Award, 2024 In 2022, it was reported that plus-sizes accounted for nearly twenty percent of all women's apparel sales in the United States and was one of the industry's few growth sectors. For many, this news seemed to herald a remarkably inclusive turn for an industry that long bartered in exclusivity. Yet the recent success of plus-size fashion obscures a rather complicated history–one that can be traced back over a century, and which illuminates the fraught relationship between fashion, fat, and weight bias in American culture. Although many regard fat as a malady of the present, in the early twentieth century it was e...
More than eighty designs--iconic, archaic, quotidian, and taboo--that have defined the arc of human reproduction. While birth often brings great joy, making babies is a knotty enterprise. The designed objects that surround us when it comes to menstruation, birth control, conception, pregnancy, childbirth, and early motherhood vary as oddly, messily, and dramatically as the stereotypes suggest. This smart, image-rich, fashion-forward, and design-driven book explores more than eighty designs--iconic, conceptual, archaic, titillating, emotionally charged, or just plain strange--that have defined the relationships between people and babies during the past century. Each object tells a story. In s...
This volume was first published by Inter-Disciplinary Press in 2016. The ever-elusive field of Beauty Studies is one that often underappreciated, yet it is a key concept across all spheres of knowledge, transcending traditional and innovative epistemologies, and providing provocative insights into fundamental aspects of human existence. Here, researchers from around the globe contribute rich and diverse ideas and perspectives from a multitude of disciplines to highlight, explore, and re-evaluate the significance and infinite implications of this pervading topic, within history, science, society, culture, new media, mathematics, art, and literature.
An encyclopaedic selection of 111 garments, footwear, and accessories - from humble masterpieces to high fashion - that have had a strong impact on society in the 20th and 21st centuries and continue to hold currency today. Published to accompany the first major exhibition on fashion design at The Museum of Modern Art since 1944, Items: Is Fashion Modern? presents 111 iconic garments, footwear and accessories that have strongly influenced society in the 20th and 21st- centuries and continue to hold currency today. Organized alphabetically as a reference book, the publication examines the ways in which these items are designed, manufactured, distributed and used, while exploring the wide rang...
"An original contribution to fashion studies, Fashion in American Life challenges existing approaches to fashion in America by considering who 'makes' fashion-when, where, and how. Race, gender, ethnicity, and class are employed as critical lenses to shed new light on how fashion might be defined and addressed within America, rather than the myth of fashion designers, and New York, as the originators of American Fashion. This exploration of the everyday allows us to see American fashion as a form of agency, self-identification, creative engagement, and politics, making a unique contribution to fashion studies, fashion history, cultural studies, and beyond"--
The field of feminist studies grew from the U.S. women’s movements of the 1960s and 1970s and has continued to be deeply connected to ongoing movements for social justice. As educational institutions are increasingly seeing public scholarship and community engagement as relevant and fruitful complements to traditional academic work, feminist scholars have much to offer in demonstrating different ways to inform and interact with various communities. In Public Feminisms: From Academy to Community edited by Carrie N. Baker and Aviva Dove-Viebahn, a diverse range of feminist scholar-activists write about the dynamic and varied methods they use to reach beyond the traditional academic classroom...
Teaching Fashion Studies is the definitive resource for instructors of fashion studies at the undergraduate level and beyond. The first of its kind, it offers extensive, practical support for both seasoned instructors and those at the start of an academic career, in addition to interdisciplinary educators looking to integrate fashion into their classes. Informed by the latest research in the field and written by an international team of experts, Teaching Fashion Studies equips educators with a diverse collection of exercises, assignments, and pedagogical reflections on teaching fashion across disciplines. Each chapter offers an assignment, with guidance on how to effectively implement it in the classroom, as well as reflections on pedagogical strategies and student learning outcomes. Facilitating the integration of practice and theory in the classroom, topics include: the business of fashion; the media and popular culture; ethics and sustainability; globalization; history; identity; trend forecasting; and fashion design.
Over the past ten years the study of dress history has finally broken free of the shackles that have held it back, and is now benefiting from new, multidisciplinary approaches and practices, which draw on material culture, art history, ethnography, and cultural studies. This book focuses on the development of these new methods to be found within the field of dress history and dress studies, and assesses the current condition and future directions of the subject.
Fashion branding is a process that needs to be analysed from a style, luxury and historical pop cultural view using critical, ethnographic, individualistic or interpretive methods. Contributors examine the meaning behind branding in the context of contested power relations underpinning the production, marketing and consumption of style and fashion.
"The first systematic study of fatness and thinness in the fashion industry, this book explores the reasons why fashion producers forgo the plus-size market in favour of the ideal of thinness"--