The award-winning classic on why we must revolutionise the fashion industry

*Selected by Emma Watson for her Ultimate Book List*

Fashion is political. From the red carpets of the Met Gala to online fast fashion, clothes tell a story of inequality, racism, and climate crisis. In The Anti-Capitalist Book of Fashion, Tansy E. Hoskins unpicks the threads of capitalist industry to reveal the truth about our clothes.

Fashion brands entice us to consume more by manipulating us to feel ugly, poor and worthless, sentiments that line the pockets of billionaires exploiting colonial supply chains. Garment workers on poverty pay risk their lives in dangerous factories, animals are tortured, fossil fuels extracted and toxic chemicals spread just to keep this season's collections fresh.

We can do better than this. Moving between Karl Lagerfeld and Karl Marx, The Anti-Capitalist Book of Fashion goes beyond ethical fashion and consumer responsibility showing that if we want to feel comfortable in our clothes, we need to reshape the system and ensure this is not our last season.

In the first ever book devoted to a critical investigation of the personal style blogosphere, Minh-Ha T. Pham examines the phenomenal rise of elite Asian bloggers who have made a career of posting photographs of themselves wearing clothes on the Internet. Pham understands their online activities as “taste work” practices that generate myriad forms of capital for superbloggers and the brands they feature. A multifaceted and detailed analysis, Asians Wear Clothes on the Internet addresses questions concerning the status and meaning of “Asian taste” in the early twenty-first century, the kinds of cultural and economic work Asian tastes do, and the fashion public and industry’s appetite for certain kinds of racialized eliteness. Situating blogging within the historical context of gendered and racialized fashion work while being attentive to the broader cultural, technological, and economic shifts in global consumer capitalism, Asians Wear Clothes on the Internet has profound implications for understanding the changing and enduring dynamics of race, gender, and class in shaping some of the most popular work practices and spaces of the digital fashion media economy.

 

Since the 1990s, young Asian Americans including Doo-Ri Chung, Derek Lam, Thakoon Panichgul, Alexander Wang, and Jason Wu have emerged as leading fashion designers. They have won prestigious awards, been chosen to head major clothing labels, and had their designs featured in Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, and other fashion magazines. At the same time that these designers were rising to prominence, the fashion world was embracing Asian chic. During the 1990s, “Asian” shapes, fabrics, iconography, and colors filled couture runways and mass-market clothing racks. In The Beautiful Generation, Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu explores the role of Asian American designers in New York’s fashion industry, paying particular attention to how they relate to the garment workers who produce their goods and to Asianness as a fashionable commodity. She draws on conversations with design students, fashion curators, and fashion publicists; interviews with nearly thirty Asian American designers who have their own labels; and time spent with those designers in their shops and studios, on their factory visits, and at their fashion shows. The Beautiful Generation links the rise of Asian American designers to historical patterns of immigration, racial formation, and globalized labor, and to familial and family-like connections between designers and garment workers.

Class Acts explores the development of lifestyle marketing from the 1960s to the 1990s. During this time, young men began manipulating their identities by taking on the mannerisms, culture, and fashion of the working class and poor. These style choices had contradictory meanings. At once they were acts of rebellion by middleclass young men against their social stratum and its rules of masculinity and also examples of the privilege that allowed them to try on different identities for amusement or as a rite of passage. Starting in the 1960s, advertisers and marketers, looking for new ways to appeal to young people, seized on the idea of identity as a choice, creating the field of lifestyle marketing.
 
Mary Rizzo traces the development of the concept of lifestyle marketing, showing how marketers disconnected class identity from material reality, focusing instead on a person’s attitudes, opinions, and behaviors. The book includes discussions of the rebel of the 1950s, the hippie of the 1960s, the white suburban hip-hop fan of the 1980s, and the poverty chic of the 1990s. Class Acts illuminates how the concept of “lifestyle,” particularly as expressed through fashion, has disconnected social class from its material reality and diffused social critique into the opportunity to simply buy another identity. The book will appeal to scholars and other readers who are interested in American cultural history, youth culture, fashion, and style.
 

This book brings together contributors from a wide range of disciplines to explore the importance of cotton as a major resource for US fashion businesses. It is rooted in a lengthy investigative research project that deployed undergraduate and graduate students and faculty researchers to US fashion businesses that rely on cotton to make their garments—with the goal of better understanding how such a key resource is sourced, priced, transported, manipulated, and, ultimately, sold on to the consumer as a stylish garment. The contributors focus in particular on the role of brands in the marketing of cotton goods, and the way that brand marketing creates distinctions, valuable in the marketplace, between various versions of what are at base similar items of clothing, like t-shirts and underclothes. The book also explores the importance of the “Made in the USA” campaign, with its appeal to consumers concerned about local manufacturing employment, reduced resource use, and social responsibility.
 

In Old Regime France credit was both a central part of economic exchange and a crucial concept for explaining dynamics of influence and power in all spheres of life. Contemporaries used the term credit to describe reputation and the currency it provided in court politics, literary production, religion, and commerce. Moving beyond Pierre Bourdieu's theorization of capital, this book establishes credit as a key matrix through which French men and women perceived their world. As Clare Haru Crowston demonstrates, credit unveils the personal character of market transactions, the unequal yet reciprocal ties binding society, and the hidden mechanisms of political power.

Credit economies constituted "economies of regard" in which reputation depended on embodied performances of credibility. Crowston explores the role of fashionable appearances and sexual desire in leveraging credit and reconstructs women's vigorous participation in its gray markets. The scandalous relationship between Queen Marie Antoinette and fashion merchant Rose Bertin epitomizes the vertical loyalties and deep social divides of the credit regime and its increasingly urgent political stakes.

This volume presents a collection of the most recent knowledge on the relationship between gender and fashion in historical and contemporary contexts. Through fourteen essays divided into three segments—how dress creates, disrupts, and transcends gender—the essays investigate gender issues through the lens of fashion. Crossing Gender Boundaries first examines how clothing has been, and continues to be, used to create and maintain the binary gender division that has come to permeate Western and westernized cultures. Next, it explores how dress can be used to contest and subvert binary gender expectations, before a final section that considers the meaning of gender and how dress can transcend it, focusing on unisex and genderless clothing. The essays consider how fashion can both constrict and free gender expression, explore the ways dress and gender are products of one other, and illuminate the construction of gender through social norms. Readers will find that through analysis of the relationship between gender and fashion, they gain a better understanding of the world around them.

Grounded in the ubiquitous, ever-changing matter of fashion, Cultures of Femininity in Modern Fashion places women at the heart of modern culture. Rich and cohesive, this collection demonstrates how fashion shaped and emerged from diverse cultures of femininity and modernity. By recovering fashion as a dynamic and far-reaching force in culture and politics, the volume examines the nuanced and conflicted terrain of femininity from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century. Revealing the inextricability of fashion from modern life, the volume argues for placing gender, everyday life, and materiality at the forefront of our accounts of modernity.

This transatlantic and truly interdisciplinary collection, with an afterword by distinguished literary scholar Rita Felski, is also notable for its mix of established and emerging scholars. The contributors address diverse aspects of women’s engagement with fashion in modernity, through such topics as Sapphic architecture, tea gowns, secondhand clothing, transnational identity, the coquette, nursing uniforms, and Harlem Renaissance photographs. Cultures of Femininity in Modern Fashion traces a unique and often surprising history of modernity and its entwinement with the gendered phenomenon of fashion.

In Doing Style, Constantine V. Nakassis explores the world of youth and mass media in South India, where what Tamil youth call “style” anchors their day-to-day lives and media worlds. Through intimate ethnographic descriptions of college life in Tamil Nadu, Nakassis explores the complex ways that acts and objects of style such as brand fashion, English slang, and film representations express the multiple desires and anxieties of this generation, who live in the shadow of the promise of global modernity.
           
As Nakassis shows, while signs of the global, modern world are everywhere in post-liberalization India, for most of these young people this world is still very distant—a paradox that results in youth’s profound sense of being in between. This in-betweenness manifests itself in the ambivalent quality of style, the ways in which stylish objects are necessarily marked as counterfeit, mixed, or ironical. In order to show how this in-betweenness materializes in particular media, Nakassis explores the entanglements between youth peer groups and the sites where such stylish media objects are produced, arguing that these entanglements deeply condition the production and circulation of the media objects themselves. The result is an important and timely look at the tremendous forces of youth culture, globalization, and mass media as they interact in the vibrancy of a rapidly changing India. 

As Oscar Wilde once wrote, “Fashion is a form of ugliness so absolutely unbearable that we have to alter it every six months.” And yet it serves to make us beautiful, or at least make us feel beautiful. In this book, Mari Grinde Arntzen asks how and why this is—how can fashion simultaneously attract us to its glamour and repel us with its superficiality and how being called “fashionable” can be at once a compliment and an insult.

Arntzen guides us through the major figures and brands of today’s fashion industry, showing how they shape us and in turn why we love to be shaped by them. She examines both everyday, affordable “fast fashion” brands, as well as the luxury market, to show how fashion commands a powerful influence on every socioeconomic level of our society. Stepping into our closets with us, she thinks about what happens when we get dressed: why fashion can make us feel powerful, beautiful, and original at the same time that it forces us into conformity. Stripping off the layers of the world’s fifth largest industry, garment by garment, she holds fashion up as a phenomenon, business, and art, exploring the questions it forces us to ask about the body, image, celebrity, and self-obsession.

Ultimately, Arntzen asks the most direct question: what is fashion? How has it taken such a powerful hold on the world, forever propelling us toward its concepts of beauty? 

In Dressed as in a Painting, Kimberly Wahl provides a lucid exploration of the interrelations between fashion, art, and Aestheticism during the latter half of the nineteenth century. Although artistic forms of dress have been the subject of short studies before, no book has focused exclusively on Aesthetic dress and its various expressions in the visual cultures of Victorian Britain. More important, no book has attempted to investigate the gap between the material facts of artistic clothing as it was embodied on the wearer, and its presence as an idealized sartorial trope in the visual and textual print culture of the period.

Edith Wharton and the Making of Fashion places the iconic New York figure and her writing in the context of fashion history and shows how dress lies at the very center of her thinking about art and culture. The study traces American patronage of the Paris couture houses from Worth and Doucet through Poiret and Chanel and places Wharton's characters in these establishments and garments to offer fresh readings of her well-known novels. Less known are Wharton's knowledge of and involvement in the craft of garment making in her tales of seamstresses, milliners, and textile workers, as well as in her creation of workshops in Paris during the First World War to employ Belgian and French seamstresses and promote the value of handmade garments in a world given to machine-driven uniformity of design and labor. Pointing the way toward further research and inquiry, Katherine Joslin has produced a truly interdisciplinary work that combines the best of literary criticism with an infectious love and appreciation of material culture.

In this innovative collaborative ethnography of Italian-Chinese ventures in the fashion industry, Lisa Rofel and Sylvia J. Yanagisako offer a new methodology for studying transnational capitalism. Drawing on their respective linguistic and regional areas of expertise, Rofel and Yanagisako show how different historical legacies of capital, labor, nation, and kinship are crucial in the formation of global capitalism. Focusing on how Italian fashion is manufactured, distributed, and marketed by Italian-Chinese ventures and how their relationships have been complicated by China's emergence as a market for luxury goods, the authors illuminate the often-overlooked processes that produce transnational capitalism—including privatization, negotiation of labor value, rearrangement of accumulation, reconfiguration of kinship, and outsourcing of inequality. In so doing, Fabricating Transnational Capitalism reveals the crucial role of the state and the shifting power relations between nations in shaping the ideas and practices of the Italian and Chinese partners.

Robert Herrick (1591–1674) achieved fame only in the nineteenth century. The book features approximately fifty reproductions of illustrations of Hesperides.

Fashion is at once a familiar yet mysteriously elite world that we all experience, whether we’re buying a new pair of jeans, reading Vogue, or watching the latest episode of Project Runway. Lars Svendsen dives into that world in Fashion, exploring the myths, ideas, and history that make up haute couture, the must-have trends over the centuries, and the very concept of fashion itself.

Fashion opens with an exploration of all the possible meanings encompassed by the word “fashion,” as Svendsen probes its elusive place in art, politics, and history. Ultimately, however, he focuses on the most common use of the term: clothing. With his trademark dry wit, he deftly dismantles many of the axioms of the industry and its supporters. For example, he points out that some of the latest fashions shown on runways aren’t actually “fashionable” in any sense of the word, arguing that they’re more akin to modern art works, and he argues against the increasingly prevalent idea that plastic surgery and body modification are part of a new wave of consumerism. Svendsen draws upon the writings of thinkers from Adam Smith to Roland Barthes to analyze fashion as both a historical phenomenon and a philosophy of aesthetics. He also traces the connections between the concepts of fashion and modernity and ultimately considers the importance of evolving fashions to such fields as art, politics, and philosophy.

Whether critiquing a relentless media culture that promotes perfect bodies or parsing the never-ending debate over the merits of conformity versus individual style, Lars Svendsen offers an engaging and intriguing analysis of fashion and the motivations behind its constant pursuit of the new.

Fashion and Ethics focuses on issues of power, social positioning, and practices among creators, producers, practitioners, wearers, and consumers of fashion. With a special emphasis on the moral fabric of clothing, contributors to the book offer a critique of some of the fundamental assumptions of ethical fashion and expose how products are often framed as fair trade in order to relieve consumers' guilt.

With essays that problematize issues such as ethical fashion’s self-appointed morality, the first-world notion that the environment should take priority over human development, the conflict between business profit and ethics, the unintended agendas involved in consuming green cosmetics or ethical culinary trends, and the discursive strategies of denial of the extreme cruelty in the procurement of animal skin and fur for use in fashion, Fashion and Ethics applies its uncompromising scrutiny to all areas of fashion. Throughout, the volume forces readers to confront the question: Does ethical fashion go deep enough into challenging unethical behavior or is it just a charade of good intentions?

It has long been said that clothes make the man (or woman), but is it still true today? If so, how has the information clothes convey changed over the years? Using a wide range of historical and contemporary materials, Diana Crane demonstrates how the social significance of clothing has been transformed.

Crane compares nineteenth-century societies—France and the United States—where social class was the most salient aspect of social identity signified in clothing with late twentieth-century America, where lifestyle, gender, sexual orientation, age, and ethnicity are more meaningful to individuals in constructing their wardrobes. Today, clothes worn at work signify social class, but leisure clothes convey meanings ranging from trite to political. In today's multicode societies, clothes inhibit as well as facilitate communication between highly fragmented social groups.

Crane extends her comparison by showing how nineteenth-century French designers created fashions that suited lifestyles of Paris elites but that were also widely adopted outside France. By contrast, today's designers operate in a global marketplace, shaped by television, film, and popular music. No longer confined to elites, trendsetters are drawn from many social groups, and most trends have short trajectories. To assess the impact of fashion on women, Crane uses voices of college-aged and middle-aged women who took part in focus groups. These discussions yield fascinating information about women's perceptions of female identity and sexuality in the fashion industry.

An absorbing work, Fashion and Its Social Agendas stands out as a critical study of gender, fashion, and consumer culture.
"Why do people dress the way they do? How does clothing contribute to a person's identity as a man or woman, as a white-collar professional or blue-collar worker, as a preppie, yuppie, or nerd? How is it that dress no longer denotes social class so much as lifestyle? . . . Intelligent and informative, [this] book proposes thoughtful answers to some of these questions."-Library Journal

Aside from the occasional nod to epaulets or use of camouflage, war and fashion seem to be strange partners. Not so, argue the contributors to this book, who connect military industrial practices as well as military dress to textile and clothing in new ways. For instance, the book includes a series of commentaries on the impact of military dress in the airline industry, in illustrated wartime comics, and even considers today’s muscled soldier’s body as a new type of uniform. Elsewhere, the impacts of conquest introduce a new set of postcolonial aesthetics; this is because military and colonial regimes disrupted local textile production and garment making. In another chapter, it is argued that textiles and fashion are important because they reflect a core practice, one that bridges textile artists and designers in an expressive, creative, and deeply physical way to matters of cultural significance. And the book concludes by calling the very mode of "military chic" into ethical question.

The premier text to illustrate the impact of war on textiles, bodies, costume, art, and design, Fashion and  War in Popular Culture will be warmly welcomed by scholars of fashion design and theory, historians of fashion, and those interested in theories of warfare and military science.

In a searing 2012 Guardian op-ed, Hannah Azieb Pool took Western fashion designers to task for their so-called African-inspired clothing. “Dear Fashion,” she wrote, “Africa is a continent, not a country. Can you imagine anyone describing a fashion trend as ‘European-inspired?' Of course not. It’s meaningless.” Now, with Fashion Cities Africa, Pool aims to correct the misconceptions about African fashion, providing key context for contemporary African fashion scenes and capturing the depth and breadth of truly African fashion.

Tied to the Fashion Cities Africa exhibition at the Brighton Museum, the book gives much needed attention to four key African fashion scenes: Nairobi, Lagos, Casablanca, and Johannesburg—one from each region of the continent. Filled with interviews of leading African fashion designers, stylists, and commentators, alongside hundreds of exclusive street-style images, Fashion Cities Africa is a landmark book that should be celebrated in fashion houses the world over.

What do our clothes say about who we are or who we think we are? How does the way we dress communicate messages about our identity? Is the desire to be "in fashion" universal, or is it unique to Western culture? How do fashions change? These are just a few of the intriguing questions Fred Davis sets out to answer in this provocative look at what we do with our clothes—and what they can do to us.

Much of what we assume to be individual preference, Davis shows, really reflects deeper social and cultural forces. Ours is an ambivalent social world, characterized by tensions over gender roles, social status, and the expression of sexuality. Predicting what people will wear becomes a risky gamble when the link between private self and public persona can be so unstable.

Explore medieval fashions through illuminated manuscripts—from the luxurious garments worn by royalty to the modest clothes of the peasantry.

From the costly velvets and furs worn by kings to the undyed wools and rough linens of the peasantry, the clothing worn by the various classes in the Middle Ages played an integral role in medieval society. In addition to providing clues to status, profession, and/or geographic origin, textiles were a crucial element in the economies of many countries and cities.
 
Much of what is known about medieval fashion is gleaned from the pages of manuscripts, which serve as a rich source of imagery. This volume provides a detailed look at both the actual fabrics and composition of medieval clothing as well as the period’s attitude toward fashion through an exploration of illuminated manuscripts in the collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum. The last portion of the book is dedicated to the depiction of clothing in biblical times and the ancient world as seen through a medieval lens. Throughout, excerpts from literary sources of the period help shed light on the perceived role and function of fashion in daily life.

Fashion Nation argues that popular images of the United States as a place of glitter and lights, of gaudy costumes and dizzying visual surfaces—usually understood as features of technomodernity—were in fact brewed in the rich, strange world of early nineteenth-century British and European folk nationalism when nations were compelled to offer visual manifestations of their allegedly true ancestral form. Showing that folk and ethnic nationalism played a central role in writing and culture, the book draws on a rare and colorful visual archive of national costumes, cartoons, theatrical spectacles, and immersive entertainments to show how the United States sprung to life as a visual space for transatlantic audiences. Fashion Nation not only includes chapters on major U.S. travel writers like Nathaniel Parker Willis and James Fenimore Cooper, but it also presents explorations of the vogue for folk and ethnic costume, the role of Indigenous dress in Wild West spectacles, and the nationalistic décor on display at late nineteenth-century world’s fairs and amusement parks. Engagingly written and beautifully illustrated, Fashion Nation opens the door to a forgotten legacy of visual symbols that still inhabit ethnic and white nationalism in the United States today, showing how fantasies of glittery surfaces were designed to draw the eye away from a sordid history.

In her insightful study, Fashioning Diaspora, Vanita Reddy carefully maps how transnational itineraries of Indian beauty and fashion shape South Asian American cultural identities and racialized belonging from the 1990s to the late-2000s. She observes how diasporic subjects engage with and respond to various encounters with Indian beauty and fashion.
 
One of the first books to consider beauty and fashion as a point of entry into an examination of South Asian diasporic public cultures, Fashioning Diaspora examines a range of literature, visual art, and live performance. Through careful analyses of novels by Bharati Mukherjee and Jhumpa Lahiri, young adult literature, performance art by Shailja Patel, as well as objects of popular culture including an Indian American fashion doll, and beauty and adornment practices, Reddy challenges fashion and beauty as a set of dematerialized, overly commodified cultural practices. She argues instead that beauty and fashion structure South Asian Americans’ uneven access to social mobility, capital, and citizenship, and demonstrates their varying capacities to produce social attachments across national, class, racial, gender, and generational divides.  

To celebrate the acquisition of the archive of distinguished artist Tom Phillips, the Bodleian Library asked the artist to assemble and design a series of books drawing on his themed collection of over 50,000 photographic postcards. These encompass the first half of the twentieth century, a period in which, thanks to the ever cheaper medium of photography, ordinary people could afford to own portraits of themselves. Each of the books in the series contains two hundred images chosen from a visually rich vein of social history. Their covers also feature thematically linked paintings, specially created for each title, from Phillips’s signature work, A Humument.

 

Menswear shows men in all manner of outfits. Formal and casual, adorned with ties, gloves, pocket squares, and walking sticks, the men display both their individual style and the fads and fashions of the time. Each of these unique and visually stunning books give a rich glimpse of forgotten times and will be greatly valued by art and history lovers alike.

 

 

Montréal is à la mode. A fashionable city in its own right, it also boasts fashion schools, an industry packed with local designers and manufacturers, and a dynamic scene that exhibits local and international collections. With its vibrant cultural life and affordable cost of living, designers and artists flock from all over to be a part of Montréal’s hip fashion community. MontréalChic is the first book to document this scene and how it connects with the city’s design, film, music, and cultural history. Scholars Katrina Sark and Sara Danièle Bélanger-Michaud are intimately acquainted with Montréal and use their firsthand knowledge of the city’s fashion to explore urban culture, music, institutions, scenes, and subcultures, along the way uncovering many untold stories of Montréal’s fashion scene.

In the shops of London's Oxford Street, girls wear patterned scarves over their hair as they cluster around makeup counters. Alongside them, hip twenty-somethings style their head-wraps in high black topknots to match their black boot-cut trousers. Participating in the world of popular mainstream fashion—often thought to be the domain of the West—these young Muslim women are part of an emergent cross-faith transnational youth subculture of modest fashion. In treating hijab and other forms of modest clothing as fashion, Reina Lewis counters the overuse of images of veiled women as "evidence" in the prevalent suggestion that Muslims and Islam are incompatible with Western modernity. Muslim Fashion contextualizes modest wardrobe styling within Islamic and global consumer cultures, interviewing key players including designers, bloggers, shoppers, store clerks, and shop owners. Focusing on Britain, North America, and Turkey, Lewis provides insights into the ways young Muslim women use multiple fashion systems to negotiate religion, identity, and ethnicity.

 

Pastiche, Fashion and Galanterie in Chardin’s Genre Subjects seeks to understand how Chardin’s genre subjects were composed and constructed to communicate certain things to the elites of Paris in the 1730s and 1740s. The book argues against the conventional view of Chardin as the transparent imitator of bourgeois life and values so ingrained in art history since the nineteenth century. Instead, it makes the case that these pictures were crafted to demonstrate the artist’s wit (esprit) and taste, traits linked to conventions of seventeenth-century galanterie. Early eighteenth-century Moderns like Jean-Siméon Chardin (1699–1779) embraced an aesthetic grounded upon a notion of beauty that could not be put into words—the je ne sais quoi. Despite its vagueness, this model of beauty was drawn from the present, departed from standards of formal beauty, and could only be known through the critical exercise of taste. Though selecting subjects from the present appears to be a simple matter, it was complicated by the fact that the modernizers expressed themselves through the vehicles of older, established forms. In Chardin’s case, he usually adapted the forms of seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish genre painting in his genre subjects. This gambit required an audience familiar enough with the conventions of Lowlands art to grasp the play involved in a knowing imitation, or pastiche. Chardin’s first group of enthusiasts accordingly were collectors who bought works of living French artists as well as Dutch and Flemish masters from the previous century, notably aristocratic connoisseurs like the chevalier Antoine de la Roque and Count Carl-Gustaf Tessin.

Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
 

From Style Rookie to Style Bubble, personal style blogs exploded onto the scene in the mid-2000s giving voice to young and stylish writers who had their own unique take on the seasonal fashion cycle and how to curate an individual style within the shifting swirl of trends. Personal Style Blogs examines the history and rise of style blogging and looks closely at the relationship between bloggers and their (frequently anonymous) readers as well as the response of the fashion industry to style bloggers’ amateur and often unauthorized fashion reportage.
 
The book charts the development of the style blogosphere and its transformation from an alternative, experimental space to one dominated by the fashion industry. Complete with examples of several famous fashion bloggers, such as Susie Lau, Rumi Neely, and Tavi Gevinson, the author explores notions of individuality, aesthetics, and performance on both sides of the digital platform. Findlay asks: what can style blogging teach us about women’s writing and the performance of a private self online? And what drives style bloggers to carve a space for themselves online?
 

A remarkable anthology of key writings that parallels the history of fashion with modern life

Writing more than a century before Vogue, no less a figure than G. W. F. Hegel reviewed the fashion of his day and found it wanting because, in becoming outmoded so quickly, it drew attention away from the timeless beauty of the human form. And Hegel is not unique among philosophers in his interest in fashion’s role; for more than 250 years, social thinkers have considered fashion—its transitive nature, the conformity it inspires, the vast range of its influence—as a defining feature of modern life.

In The Rise of Fashion, Daniel Leonhard Purdy brings together key writings from the Enlightenment to the twentieth century that explore fashion as the ultimate expression of modernity. Making available many previously untranslated or otherwise unfamiliar works from French, German, and English, Purdy establishes an extraordinary lineage of fashion commentary dating back to Mandeville and Voltaire, which laid the groundwork for the writings on commodity culture of Adorno, Benjamin, and the Frankfurt School. From critiques of aristocratic excess to accounts of fashion’s influence on our ideals of masculinity or femininity, from the figure of the dandy and the eroticism of clothing to the class politics of fashion, this landmark reader includes works by philosophers (Carlyle, Rousseau, Georg Simmel) and social theorists (Herbert Spencer, Veblen), as well as writers (Goethe, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Wilde) and critics (Karl Kraus, Adolf Loos, Simone de Beauvoir).Collecting and contextualizing many of the earliest and most significant formulations of fashion theory, The Rise of Fashion provocatively examines the proposition that to be modern is to be fashionable.

When we donate our unwanted clothes to charity, we rarely think about what will happen to them: who will sort and sell them, and finally, who will revive and wear them. In this fascinating look at the multibillion dollar secondhand clothing business, Karen Tranberg Hansen takes us around the world from the West, where clothing is donated, through the salvage houses in North America and Europe, where it is sorted and compressed, to Africa, in this case, Zambia. There it enters the dynamic world of Salaula, a Bemba term that means "to rummage through a pile."

Essential for the African economy, the secondhand clothing business is wildly popular, to the point of threatening the indigenous textile industry. But, Hansen shows, wearing secondhand clothes is about much more than imitating Western styles. It is about taking a garment and altering it to something entirely local, something that adheres to current cultural norms of etiquette. By unraveling how these garments becomes entangled in the economic, political, and cultural processes of contemporary Zambia, Hansen also raises provocative questions about environmentalism, charity, recycling, and thrift.

In recent years, geeks have become chic, and the fashion and beauty industries have responded to this trend with a plethora of fashion-forward merchandise aimed at the increasingly lucrative fan demographic. This mainstreaming of fan identity is reflected in the glut of pop culture T-shirts lining the aisles of big box retailers as well as the proliferation of fan-focused lifestyle brands and digital retailers over the past decade. While fashion and beauty have long been integrated into the media industry with tie-in lines, franchise products, and other forms of merchandise, there has been limited study of fans’ relationship to these items and industries.  

Sartorial Fandom shines a spotlight on the fashion and beauty cultures that undergird fandoms, considering the retailers, branded products, and fan-made objects that serve as forms of identity expression.  This collection is invested in the subcultural and mainstream expression of style and in the spaces where the two intersect. Fan culture is, in many respects, an optimal space to situate a study of style because fandom itself is often situated between the subcultural and the mainstream. Collectively, the chapters in this anthology explore how various axes of lived identity interact with a growing movement to consider fandom as a lifestyle category, ultimately contending that sartorial practices are central to fan expression but also indicative of the primacy of fandom in contemporary taste cultures.

Slaves to Fashion is a pioneering cultural history of the black dandy, from his emergence in Enlightenment England to his contemporary incarnations in the cosmopolitan art worlds of London and New York. It is populated by sartorial impresarios such as Julius Soubise, a freed slave who sometimes wore diamond-buckled, red-heeled shoes as he circulated through the social scene of eighteenth-century London, and Yinka Shonibare, a prominent Afro-British artist who not only styles himself as a fop but also creates ironic commentaries on black dandyism in his work. Interpreting performances and representations of black dandyism in particular cultural settings and literary and visual texts, Monica L. Miller emphasizes the importance of sartorial style to black identity formation in the Atlantic diaspora.

 

Dandyism was initially imposed on black men in eighteenth-century England, as the Atlantic slave trade and an emerging culture of conspicuous consumption generated a vogue in dandified black servants. “Luxury slaves” tweaked and reworked their uniforms, and were soon known for their sartorial novelty and sometimes flamboyant personalities. Tracing the history of the black dandy forward to contemporary celebrity incarnations such as Andre 3000, Miller explains how black people became arbiters of style and how they have historically used the dandy’s signature tools—clothing, gesture, and wit—to break down limiting identity markers and propose new ways of fashioning political and social possibility in the black Atlantic world. With an aplomb worthy of her iconographic subject, she considers the black dandy in relation to nineteenth-century American literature and drama, W. E. B. Du Bois’s reflections on black masculinity and cultural nationalism, the modernist aesthetics of the Harlem Renaissance, and representations of black cosmopolitanism in contemporary visual art.

"A brilliant and beautiful book, the mature work of a lifetime, must reading for students of the globalization debate."
---Tom Hayden

"Slaves to Fashion is a remarkable achievement, several books in one: a gripping history of sweatshops, explaining their decline, fall, and return; a study of how the media portray them; an analysis of the fortunes of the current anti-sweatshop movement; an anatomy of the global traffic in apparel, in particular the South-South competition that sends wages and working conditions plummeting toward the bottom; and not least, a passionate declaration of faith that humanity can find a way to get its work done without sweatshops. This is engaged sociology at its most stimulating."
---Todd Gitlin

". . . unflinchingly portrays the reemergence of the sweatshop in our dog-eat-dog economy."
---Los Angeles Times


Just as Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed uncovered the plight of the working poor in America, Robert J. S. Ross's Slaves to Fashion exposes the dark side of the apparel industry and its exploited workers at home and abroad. It's both a lesson in American business history and a warning about one of the most important issues facing the global capital economy-the reappearance of the sweatshop.

Vividly detailing the decline and tragic rebirth of sweatshop conditions in the American apparel industry of the twentieth century, Ross explains the new sweatshops as a product of unregulated global capitalism and associated deregulation, union erosion, and exploitation of undocumented workers. Using historical material and economic and social data, the author shows that after a brief thirty-five years of fair practices, the U.S. apparel business has once again sunk to shameful abuse and exploitation.

Refreshingly jargon-free but documented in depth, Slaves to Fashion is the only work to estimate the size of the sweatshop problem and to systematically show its impact on apparel workers' wages. It is also unique in its analysis of the budgets and personnel used in enforcing the Fair Labor Standards Act.

Anyone who is concerned about this urgent social and economic topic and wants to go beyond the headlines should read this important and timely contribution to the rising debate on low-wage factory labor.

It was a scene that had many names: some original members referred to themselves as punks, others, new romantics, new wavers, the bats, or the morbids. “Goth” did not gain lexical currency until the late 1980s. But no matter what term was used, “postpunk” encompasses all the incarnations of the 1980s alternative movement. Some Wear Leather, Some Wear Lace is a visual and oral history of the first decade of the scene. Featuring interviews with both the performers and the audience to capture the community on and off stage, the book places personal snapshots alongside professional photography to reveal a unique range of fashions, bands, and scenes.

A book about the music, the individual, and the creativity of a worldwide community rather than theoretical definitions of a subculture, Some Wear Leather, Some Wear Lace considers a subject not often covered by academic books. Whether you were part of the scene or are just fascinated by different modes of expression, this book will transport you to another time and place.

Few cities in the world offer the diversity of stunning visuals that can be found on the streets of Moscow, from famous landmarks like Red Square to the Boulevard Ring and Kamergersky Lane and the residential areas beyond the Garden Ring. For this book, former Moscow resident Elena Siemens traveled them all as an urban flâneur, taking photographs of contemporary fashion in action and setting it alongside explorations of modern and historic representations of fashion and beauty as seen in a wide variety of products of Russian culture. Through her photos and analysis, Siemens considers the question of how contemporary Russians understand their post-Soviet identity and express it through the ways they present themselves in public.
 

Style and the Single Girl by Hope Howell Hodgkins reveals how four very different single-girl novelists employed modern modes to re-dress the traditional English marriage plot. In the first monograph to use fashion theory and history to trace the literary progress of British women in later modernity, Hodgkins argues that correspondences between a gendered sartorial style and a gendered literary style persisted throughout the modern era. She demonstrates how those correspondences did not fade but became fraught as women matured in the sharply gendered crucible of war.
 
Hodgkins delineates how in the 1920s and 1930s, popular novels by Dorothy Sayers and high-art fiction by Jean Rhys used dress to comment wittily and bitterly on gender relations. During World War II, changes in British Vogue and compromises made by the literary journal Horizon signaled the death of modernist styles, as Elizabeth Bowen’s gender-bent wartime stories show. Then demure and reserved postwar styles—Dior’s curvy New Look, the Movement’s understated literary irony—were intertwined in the fictions of Barbara Pym and Muriel Spark, who re-dressed the novel with a vengeance. Whether fashioning detective fiction, literary impressionism, or postwar comedy, these novelists used style in every sense to redefine that famous question, “What do women want?”

Three Faces of Beauty offers a unique approach to understanding globalization and cultural change based on a comparative, ethnographic study of a nearly universal institution: the beauty salon. Susan Ossman traces the images and words of the beauty industry as they developed historically between Paris, Cairo, and Casablanca and then vividly demonstrates how such images are embodied today in salons located in each city.
By examining how images from fashion magazines, film, and advertising are enacted in beauty salons, Ossman demonstrates how embodiment is able to display and rework certain hierarchies. While offering the possibility of freedom from the tethers of status, nation, religion, and nature, beauty is created by these very categories and values, Ossman shows. Drawing on hundreds of interviews, she documents the various rituals of welcome, choice-making, pricing practices, and spatial arrangements in multiple salons . She also reveals ways in which patrons in all three cities imagine and co-opt looks they believe are fashionable in the other cities. By observing salons as scenes of instruction, Ossman reveals that beautiful bodies evolve within the intertwining contexts of media, modernity, location, time, postcolonialism, and male expectation.

Everywhere we look, people are using fashion to communicate self and society—who they are, and where they belong. Transglobal Fashion Narratives presents an international, interdisciplinary analysis of those narratives. Moving from sweatshop to runway, page to screen, camera to blog, and artist to audience, the book examines fashion as a mediated form of content in branding, as a literary and filmic device, and as a personal form of expression by industry professionals, journalists, and bloggers.

From the haute couture runways of Paris and New York and editorial photo shoots for glossy fashion magazines to reality television, models have been a ubiquitous staple of twentieth- and twenty-first-century American consumer culture. In Work! Elspeth H. Brown traces the history of modeling from the advent of photographic modeling in the early twentieth century to the rise of the supermodel in the 1980s. Brown outlines how the modeling industry sanitized and commercialized models' sex appeal in order to elicit and channel desire into buying goods. She shows how this new form of sexuality—whether exhibited in the Ziegfeld Follies girls' performance of Anglo-Saxon femininity or in African American models' portrayal of black glamour in the 1960s—became a central element in consumer capitalism and a practice that has always been shaped by queer sensibilities. By outlining the paradox that queerness lies at the center of capitalist heteronormativity and telling the largely unknown story of queer models and photographers, Brown offers an out of the ordinary history of twentieth-century American culture and capitalism.