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Fashion is a dynamic global industry that plays an important role in the economic, political, cultural, and social lives of an international audience. It spans high art and popular culture, and plays a significant role in material and visual culture. This book introduces fashion's myriad influences and manifestations. Fashion is explored as a creative force, a business, and a means of communication. From Karl Lagerfeld's creative reinventions of Chanel's iconic style to the multicultural reference points of Indian designer Manish Arora, from the spectacular fashion shows held in nineteenth century department stores to the mix-and-match styles of Japanese youth, the book examines the ways tha...
Drawing upon both contemporary visual and written sources, this book illuminates the role that fashion plays in reflecting and shaping attitudes toward display and adornment. As traditional cultural notions of what is admissible or acceptable have fragmented, fashion has been a key site for experimentation. At both the haute couture and street level, clothing enables identities to be visualized, confronting the spectator with contradictory messages embodying the confusion of the time.Rebecca Arnold focuses on the last thirty years and places the desires and anxieties that surround fashion in their historical context. She highlights four key themes: -- Status, Power, and Display (the flaunting of wealth, the alienating power structures of good taste), -- Violence and Provocation (the rising tide of aggression in both fashion imagery and street styles), -- The Eroticized Body (the power of sex and display and the pressure to conform to ideals), and -- Gender and Subversion (the blurring of identity to disguise and confuse).This richly illustrated book always keeps its focus on the historical and ethical potential and possibilities that modern fashion embodies.
Drawing on a wonderful array of sources, from fashion magazines to department store records, this book is the rich and absorbing narrative and analysis of how New York sportswear evolved to become the definitive American style and how a modern fashion aesthetic was born.
The first survey of Richard Avedon's influential advertising work Richard Avedon was one of the most sought-after and influential advertising photographers in America from the 1940s to the beginning of the 21st century, creating work that exemplified Madison Avenue at the height of its influence in world culture. Working with a talented cadre of models, copy writers, and art directors, Avedon made images that enticed consumers to embrace the new, especially in the areas of fashion and beauty, with campaigns for Revlon, Chanel, Calvin Klein, Dior, and Versace, among many others. Avedon Advertising tells this story, reproducing memorable ads that range from the buoyant 1940s and 1950s, when post-war prosperity opened up new experiences to consumers; through the explosive '60s; and into the era defined by celebrity culture and global brand awareness.
The 50 key modes, garments, and designers, each explained in half a minute! Even if you’re not a regular follower of Suzy Bubble, Le Happy, or The Sartorialist, you probably have some feeling for fashion. Most people have a vague idea of what’s in, what’s out, and what they might consider putting on their own backs. Less familiar to most, however, is the way fashion works as a global business – a multi-billion-pound industry, employing over 27 million people – just who decides what’s cutting edge and what’s long past its sell-by date. 30-Second Fashion offers an engrossing crash course to how the style world works today, alongside an engaging look at the founding fathers (and mothers) of fashion who set it up that way.
Fashion, and the glossy magazines it inhabits, allow Western culture to dream. It permits a person to fantasize and to experiment with new identities. It flaunts glamour and success. Appearance becomes something to be perfected and admired. These dreams and freedoms, Rebecca Arnold proposes, are contradictory. Fashion and its surrounding imagery elicit fear and anxiety in their consumers as well as pleasure. Fashion has come to incorporate the underside of modern life, with violence and decay becoming a dominant theme in clothing design and photography. Arnold draws on diverse written sources to explore the complex nature of modern fashion. She discusses a range of key themes: how fashion us...
Winner of the Association of Dress Historians Book of the Year Award, 2022 Traditionally associated with rural ways of life in England, often hand-crafted and held up as one of the only items of English folk dress to survive into the 20th century, the smock frock is an object of curiosity in many museum collections. Drawing on a wide variety of sources from surviving garments to newspapers and photographs, this book reveals the hidden history of the smock frock to present new social histories. Discussing the smock frock in its widest contexts, Alison Toplis explores how garments were handmade and manufactured by the ready-made clothing industry, and bought by men of different trades. She tra...
A man disappears. The woman who loves him is left scarred and haunted. In her fierce, one-of-a-kind debut, Rebecca Lindenberg tells the story—in verse—of her passionate relationship with Craig Arnold, a much-respected poet who disappeared in 2009 while hiking a volcano in Japan. Lindenberg’s billowing, I-contain-multitudes style lays bare the poet’s sadnesses, joys, and longings in poems that are lyric and narrative, at once plainspoken and musically elaborate. Regarding her role in Arnold’s story, Lindenberg writes with clear-eyed humility and endearing dignity: “The girl with the ink-stained teeth / knows she’s famous / in a tiny, tragic way. / She’s not / daft, after all.â...
Martin Margiela's pioneering and timeless designs made for the luxury house of Hermès between 1997 and 2003 are the stars of this book, highlighting this period in the iconic and enigmatic Belgian designer's career. The first edition was published to accompany an exhibition in the Modemuseum Antwerp. The new edition, accompanying the exhibition in Paris, includes images from the Antwerp exhibition, and more extensive essays by Rebecca Arnold, Kaat Debo and Sarah Mower, and a foreword by Suzy Menkes.This key period between 20th- and 21st-century fashion is evoked through interviews with Margiela's closest collaborators. Never-before-published material from the Maison Martin Margiela archives, numerous striking and exquisitely refined images from Le Monde d'Hermès, as well as new photographic material tell the story of Margiela's supreme wardrobe for Hermès.
This book is the first in-depth exploration of the revolutionary designers who defined American fashion in its emerging years and helped build an industry with global impact, yet have been largely forgotten. Focusing on female designers, the authors reclaim a place in history for the women who created not only for celebrities and socialites, but for millions of fashion-conscious customers across the United States. From one of America's first couturiers, Jessie Franklin Turner, to Zelda Wynn Valdes, the book captures the lost histories of the luminaries who paved the way in the world of American fashion design. This fully illustrated collection takes us from Hollywood to Broadway, from sportswear to sustainable fashion, and explores important crossovers between film, theater, and fashion. Uncovering fascinating histories of the design pioneers we should know about, the book enlarges the prevailing narrative of fashion history and will be an important reference for fashion students, historians, costume curators, and fashion enthusiasts alike.