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27 books match the query 'Clothing'

cover of Alaska Eskimo Footwear

Alaska Eskimo Footwear

Jill Oakes and Rick Riewe

University of Alaska Press, 2006

Alaska Eskimo Footwear celebrates the incredible beauty and spiritual significance of the shoes and boots worn by Alaska Native peoples. Stunning photography brings the harsh and striking environment of the North alive and demonstrates how essential footwear was to Native survival. Eskimo seamstresses, dancers, and hunters explain the symbolic meaning of their traditional patterns and decorative details, helping the reader understand the ancient stories stitched into timeless designs.

For each major Alaska Eskimo group—Inupiaq, Yup’ik, Aleut, Alutiiq, St. Lawrence Islander—authors Oakes and Riewe discuss pattern, design, and techniques for skin preparation, construction, and decoration. They describe the reasons for design and decorative differences in boots used for ceremonies and dancing versus those for everyday wear and hunting, trapping, and fishing.

Developed with Eskimo seamstresses from each Alaskan region, this full-color volume features photographs from museum collections in the United States and Russia. Detailed drawings of patterns, construction techniques, and decorative details illustrate the complexity of this ancient art and provide readers with guidance in identifying regional styles. A tribute to an exquisite art and the women who practice it, Alaska Eskimo Footwear brings the beauty of the North to life.
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cover of Asians Wear Clothes on the Internet: Race, Gender, and the Work of Personal Style Blogging

Asians Wear Clothes on the Internet

Race, Gender, and the Work of Personal Style Blogging

Minh-ha T. Pham

Duke University Press, 2015

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.
 
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cover of Berliner Chic: A Locational History of Berlin Fashion

Berliner Chic

A Locational History of Berlin Fashion

Susan Ingram and Katrina Sark

Intellect Books, 2011

Since becoming the capital of reunited Germany, Berlin has had a dose of global money and international style added to its already impressive cultural veneer. Once home to emperors and dictators, peddlers and spies, it is now a fashion showplace that attracts the young and hip. Moving beyond descriptions of Berlin's fashion industry and its ready-to-wear clothing, Berliner Chic charts the turbulent stories of entrepreneurially-savvy manufacturers and cultural workers striving to establish their city as a fashion capital, and being repeatedly interrupted by politics, ideology, and war. There are many stories to tell about Berlin's fashion industry and Berliner Chic tells them all with considerable expertise.

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cover of Clothing and Difference: Embodied Identities in Colonial and Post-Colonial Africa

Clothing and Difference

Embodied Identities in Colonial and Post-Colonial Africa

Hildi Hendrickson, ed.

Duke University Press, 1996

This volume examines the dynamic relationship between the body, clothing, and identity in sub-Saharan Africa and raises questions that have previously been directed almost exclusively to a Western and urban context. Unusual in its treatment of the body surface as a critical frontier in the production and authentification of identity, Clothing and Difference shows how the body and its adornment have been used to construct and contest social and individual identities in Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Tanzania, Kenya, and other African societies during both colonial and post-colonial times.
Grounded in the insights of anthropology and history and influenced by developments in cultural studies, these essays investigate the relations between the personal and the public, and between ideas about the self and those about the family, gender, and national groups. They explore the bodily and material creation of the changing identities of women, spirits, youths, ancestors, and entrepreneurs through a consideration of topics such as fashion, spirit possession, commodity exchange, hygiene, and mourning.
By taking African societies as its focus, Clothing and Difference demonstrates that factors considered integral to Western social development—heterogeneity, migration, urbanization, transnational exchange, and media representation—have existed elsewhere in different configurations and with different outcomes. With significance for a wide range of fields, including gender studies, cultural studies, art history, performance studies, political science, semiotics, economics, folklore, and fashion and textile analysis/design, this work provides alternative views of the structures underpinning Western systems of commodification, postmodernism, and cultural differentiation.

Contributors. Misty Bastian, Timothy Burke, Hildi Hendrickson, Deborah James, Adeline Masquelier, Elisha Renne, Johanna Schoss, Brad Weiss

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cover of Contracting Colonialism: Translation and Christian Conversion in Tagalog Society Under Early Spanish Rule

Contracting Colonialism

Translation and Christian Conversion in Tagalog Society Under Early Spanish Rule

Vicente L. Rafael

Duke University Press, 1993

In an innovative mix of history, anthropology, and post-colonial theory, Vicente L. Rafael examines the role of language in the religious conversion of the Tagalogs to Catholicism and their subsequent colonization during the early period (1580–1705) of Spanish rule in the Philippines. By tracing this history of communication between Spaniards and Tagalogs, Rafael maps the conditions that made possible both the emergence of a colonial regime and resistance to it. Originally published in 1988, this new paperback edition contains an updated preface that places the book in theoretical relation to other recent works in cultural studies and comparative colonialism.
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cover of Dreams and Ideas: The Artistry of Costume Designer Winn Morton

Dreams and Ideas

The Artistry of Costume Designer Winn Morton

Myra Walker

University of North Texas Press, 2026

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cover of Dressed for Freedom: The Fashionable Politics of American Feminism

Dressed for Freedom

The Fashionable Politics of American Feminism

Einav Rabinovitch-Fox

University of Illinois Press, 2021

Often condemned as a form of oppression, fashion could and did allow women to express modern gender identities and promote feminist ideas. Einav Rabinovitch-Fox examines how clothes empowered women, and particularly women barred from positions of influence due to race or class. Moving from 1890s shirtwaists through the miniskirts and unisex styles of the 1970s, Rabinovitch-Fox shows how the rise of mass media culture made fashion a vehicle for women to assert claims over their bodies, femininity, and social roles. She also highlights how trends in women’s sartorial practices expressed ideas of independence and equality. As women employed new clothing styles, they expanded feminist activism beyond formal organizations and movements and reclaimed fashion as a realm of pleasure, power, and feminist consciousness.

A fascinating account of clothing as an everyday feminist practice, Dressed for Freedom brings fashion into discussions of American feminism during the long twentieth century.

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cover of Dürer's Coats: Renaissance Men and Material Cultures of Social Recognition

Dürer's Coats

Renaissance Men and Material Cultures of Social Recognition

Ulinka Rublack

Central European University Press, 2025

During the Renaissance, clothing became more and more elaborately decorated and expensive. It often emphasised the privilege of the male elite. Yet clothing could also subvert or reshape conventional cultural norms. Ulinka Rublack argues that cloaks and gowns gained in importance during this period and were among the things that mediated social relationships for centuries to come. An investigation into outerwear opens a new window into how people and things were connected in the Renaissance and how important clothing was in shaping subjectivities in everyday life. Using the example of Dürer and his wife as emerging social types, the study follows the artist and the men and women of his time through the streets of Venice, Nuremberg, Augsburg and Antwerp.
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cover of Emily Dickinson and the Labor of Clothing

Emily Dickinson and the Labor of Clothing

Daneen Wardrop

University of New Hampshire Press, 2009

Daneen Wardrop's Emily Dickinson and the Labor of Clothing begins by identifying and using the dating tools of fashion to place the references to clothing in Dickinson's letters and poems, and to locate her social standing through examining her fashion choices in the iconic daguerreotype. In addition to detailing the poetics of fashion in Dickinson's work, the author argues that close examination of Dickinson and fashion cannot be separated from the changing ways that garments were produced during the nineteenth century, embracing issues of domestic labor, the Lowell textile mills, and the Amherst industry of the Hills Hat Factory located almost next door to Dickinson's Homestead. The recent retrieval of clothing from approximately thirty trunks found in the attic of the Evergreens house, which formerly belonged to Dickinson's brother and sister-in-law, further enhances this remarkable and original interdisciplinary work.
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cover of Fashion and Its Social Agendas: Class, Gender, and Identity in Clothing

Fashion and Its Social Agendas

Class, Gender, and Identity in Clothing

Diana Crane

University of Chicago Press, 2000

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
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cover of Fashioning Change: The Trope of Clothing in High- and Late-Medieval England

Fashioning Change

The Trope of Clothing in High- and Late-Medieval England

Andrea Denny-Brown

The Ohio State University Press, 2012

Medieval European culture was obsessed with clothing. In Fashioning Change: The Trope of Clothing in High-and Late-Medieval England, Andrea Denny-Brown explores the central impact of clothing in medieval ideas about impermanence and the ethical stakes of human transience. Studies of dress frequently contend with a prevailing cultural belief that bodily adornment speaks to interests that are frivolous, superficial, and cursory. Taking up the vexed topic of clothing’s inherent changeability, Denny-Brown uncovers an important new genealogy of clothing as a representational device, one imbued with a surprising philosophical pedigree and a long history of analytical weightiness.
Considering writers as diverse as Boethius, Alain de Lille, William Durand, Chaucer, and Lydgate, among others, Denny-Brown tracks the development of a literary and cultural trope that begins in the sixth century and finds its highest expression in the vernacular poetry of fifteenth-century England. Among the topics covered are Boethian discourses on the care of the self, the changing garments of Lady Fortune, novelty in ecclesiastical fashions, the sartorial legacy of Chaucer’s Griselda, and the emergence of the English gallant. These literary treatments of vestimentary variation—which develop an aesthetics of change itself—enhance our understanding of clothing as a phenomenological and philosophical category in medieval Europe and illustrate the centrality of the Middle Ages to theories of aesthetics, of materiality, and of cultural change.
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cover of Gender and the Boundaries of Dress in Contemporary Peru

Gender and the Boundaries of Dress in Contemporary Peru

By Blenda Femenías

University of Texas Press, 2005

Set in Arequipa during Peru's recent years of crisis, this ethnography reveals how dress creates gendered bodies. It explores why people wear clothes, why people make art, and why those things matter in a war-torn land. Blenda Femenías argues that women's clothes are key symbols of gender identity and resistance to racism.

Moving between metropolitan Arequipa and rural Caylloma Province, the central characters are the Quechua- and Spanish-speaking maize farmers and alpaca herders of the Colca Valley. Their identification as Indians, whites, and mestizos emerges through locally produced garments called bordados. Because the artists who create these beautiful objects are also producers who carve an economic foothold, family workshops are vital in a nation where jobs are as scarce as peace. But ambiguity permeates all practices shaping bordados' significance. Femenías traces contemporary political and ritual applications, not only Caylloma's long-standing and violent ethnic conflicts, to the historical importance of cloth since Inca times.

This is the only book about expressive culture in an Andean nation that centers on gender. In this feminist contribution to ethnography, based on twenty years' experience with Peru, including two years of intensive fieldwork, Femenías reflects on the ways gender shapes relationships among subjects, research, and representation.

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cover of Good Maya Women: Migration and Revitalization of Clothing and Language in Highland Guatemala

Good Maya Women

Migration and Revitalization of Clothing and Language in Highland Guatemala

by Joyce N. Bennett

University of Alabama Press, 2022

Analyzes the forced migration of Maya women from highland Guatemala and their turn toward language and Indigenous clothing in their homeland
 
Good Maya Women: Migration and Revitalization of Clothing and Language in Highland Guatemala analyzes how Indigenous women’s migration contributes to women’s empowerment in their home communities in Guatemala. This decolonial ethnographic analysis of Kaqchikel Maya women’s linguistic and cultural activism demonstrates that marginalized people can and do experience empowerment and hope for the future of their communities, even while living under oppressive neoliberal regimes. Joyce N. Bennett contests dominant frameworks of affect theory holding that marginalized peoples never truly experience unrestricted hope or empowerment, and she contributes new understandings of the intimate connections between Indigenous women, migration, and language and clothing revitalization.
 
Based on more than twenty months of fieldwork, the study begins with an ethnographic investigation of how economic policies force Indigenous women into migration for wage work. To survive, many, like the three young women profiled in this ethnography, are forced to leave their schooling, families, and highland homes to work in cities or other countries. They might work, for example, as vendors, selling crafts to tourists, or as housekeepers or waitresses. Their work exposes them to structural violence, including anti-Indigenous slurs, sexual harassment and violence, and robbery.
 
Furthermore, the women are pressured to wear Western clothing and to speak Spanish, which endangers Indigenous culture and language in Guatemala. Yet the Indigenous migrant women profiled do not abandon their Indigenous clothing and language, in this case Kaqchikel Maya. Instead, they find inspiration and pride in revitalizing Kaqchikel traditions in their hometowns post-migration. As women attempt to revitalize Kaqchikel Maya language and clothing, they seek to earn the title of “good” women in their home communities.
 
Unpacking women’s daily activisms reveals that women attempt to retain their language and clothing and also collectively seek to make space for Indigenous people in the modern world. Bennett reveals that women find their attempts at revitalization to be personally empowering, even when their communities do not support them.
 
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cover of Insignia of Rank in the Nahua World: From the Fifteenth to the Seventeenth Century

Insignia of Rank in the Nahua World

From the Fifteenth to the Seventeenth Century

Justyna Olko

University Press of Colorado, 2014

This significant work reconstructs the repertory of insignia of rank and the contexts and symbolic meanings of their use, along with their original terminology, among the Nahuatl-speaking communities of Mesoamerica from the fifteenth through the seventeenth centuries. Attributes of rank carried profound symbolic meaning, encoding subtle messages about political and social status, ethnic and gender identity, regional origin, individual and community history, and claims to privilege.

Olko engages with and builds upon extensive worldwide scholarship and skillfully illuminates this complex topic, creating a vital contribution to the fields of pre-Columbian and colonial Mexican studies. It is the first book to integrate pre- and post-contact perspectives, uniting concepts and epochs usually studied separately. A wealth of illustrations accompanies the contextual analysis and provides essential depth to this critical work. Insignia of Rank in the Nahua World substantially expands and elaborates on the themes of Olko's Turquoise Diadems and Staffs of Office, originally published in Poland and never released in North America.

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cover of Mormon Garments: Sacred and Secret

Mormon Garments

Sacred and Secret

Nancy Ross, Jessica Finnigan, and Larissa Kanno Kindred

University of Illinois Press, 2026

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints requires that adult members wear garments under their clothes day and night. Though a central practice, the wearing of garments exists behind a wall of silence, as Church authorities and LDS culture discourage discussion of such a sacred matter. Nancy Ross, Jessica Finnigan, and Larissa Kanno Kindred draw on a survey of over 4,500 Church members and their own backgrounds to explore the multifaceted meanings and experiences of Mormon garments. As the authors show, garments also function as a tool of social control that shapes behavior and reinforces conformity around sexuality. The diverse lived experiences of Latter-day Saints reveal how belief and gender intersect with feelings of secrecy, shame, and obedience while creating complexities for LDS members as they navigate questions of faith, identity, and agency. In addition, the authors call for greater understanding of the people grappling with tensions between personal customs and religious expectation. Insightful and rich with detail, Mormon Garments sheds light on an intimate practice in the lives of Latter-day Saints.
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cover of Muslim Fashion: Contemporary Style Cultures

Muslim Fashion

Contemporary Style Cultures

Reina Lewis

Duke University Press, 2015

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.
 
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cover of Prehistoric Sandals from Northeastern Arizona: The Earl H. Morris and Ann Axtell Morris Research

Prehistoric Sandals from Northeastern Arizona

The Earl H. Morris and Ann Axtell Morris Research

Kelley Ann Hays-Gilpin, Ann Cordy Deegan, and Elizabeth Ann Morris

University of Arizona Press, 1998

During the late 1920s and early 1930s, archaeologists Earl and Ann Axtell Morris discovered an abundance of sandals from the Basketmaker II and III through Pueblo III periods while excavating rockshelters in northeastern Arizona. These densely twined sandals made of yucca yarn were intricately crafted and elaborately decorated, and Earl Morris spent the next 25 years overseeing their analysis, description, and illustration. This is the first full published report on this unusual find, which remains one of the largest collections of sandals in Southwestern archaeology. This monograph offers an integrated archaeological and technical study of the footwear, providing for the first time a full-scale analysis of the complicated weave structures they represent. Following an account by anthropologist Elizabeth Ann Morris of her parents' research, textile authority Ann Cordy Deegan gives an overview of prehistoric Puebloan sandal types and of twined sandal construction techniques, revealing the subtleties distinguishing Basketmaker sandals of different time periods. Anthropologist Kelley Ann Hays-Gilpin then discusses the decoration of twined sandals and speculates on the purpose of such embellishment.
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cover of Sartorial Fandom: Fashion, Beauty Culture, and Identity

Sartorial Fandom

Fashion, Beauty Culture, and Identity

Elizabeth Affuso and Suzanne Scott, Editors

University of Michigan Press, 2023

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.
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cover of Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity

Slaves to Fashion

Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity

Monica L. Miller

Duke University Press, 2009

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.

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cover of Textile Traditions of Mesoamerica and the Andes: An Anthology

Textile Traditions of Mesoamerica and the Andes

An Anthology

Edited by Margot Blum Schevill, Janet Catherine Berlo, and Edward B. Dwyer

University of Texas Press, 1996

In this volume, anthropologists, art historians, fiber artists, and technologists come together to explore the meanings, uses, and fabrication of textiles in Mexico, Guatemala, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia from Precolumbian times to the present. Originally published in 1991 by Garland Publishing, the book grew out of a 1987 symposium held in conjunction with the exhibit "Costume as Communication: Ethnographic Costumes and Textiles from Middle America and the Central Andes of South America" at the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology, Brown University.

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cover of The Adorned Body: Mapping Ancient Maya Dress

The Adorned Body

Mapping Ancient Maya Dress

Edited by Nicholas Carter, Stephen D. Houston, and Franco D. Rossi

University of Texas Press, 2020

How we dress our bodies—through clothing, footwear, headgear, jewelry, haircuts, and more—is key to the expression of status and identity. This idea was as true for ancient Maya civilization as it is today, yet few studies have centered on what ancient Maya peoples wore and why. In The Adorned Body, Nicholas Carter, Stephen Houston, and Franco Rossi bring together contributions from a wide range of scholars, leading to the first in-depth study of Maya dress in pre-Columbian times.

Incorporating artistic, hieroglyphic, and archaeological sources, this book explores the clothing and ornaments of ancient Maya peoples, systematically examining who wore what, deducing the varied purposes and meanings of dress items and larger ensembles, and determining the methods and materials with which such items were created. Each essay investigates a category of dress—including headgear, pendants and necklaces, body painting, footwear, and facial ornaments—and considers the variations within each of these categories, as well as popular styles and trends through time. The final chapters reveal broader views and comparisons about costume ensembles and their social roles. Shedding new light on the art and archaeology of the ancient Americas, The Adorned Body offers a thorough map of Maya dress that will be of interest to scholars and fashion enthusiasts alike.

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cover of Trappings: Stories of Women, Power, and Clothing

Trappings

Stories of Women, Power, and Clothing

Ludwig, Tiffany

Rutgers University Press, 2007

What do you wear that makes you feel powerful? How about the woman next to you at the bank? In line with you at the store? Think about your mother. What would she put on to reveal her power source to the world? These are the questions that inspired Tiffany Ludwig and Renee Piechocki to embark on an interview journey across the United States. Over a period of six years, they talked with more than 500 women and girls, ages four through ninety-two, who ranged from office workers to drag-kings, stay-at-home moms to attorneys, fashion industry executives to elected officials, students to cowgirls.

            It is these women’s sensitive, funny, and always revealing thoughts that are at the heart of Trappings—a book that although it begins with a question about clothing is not about fashion at all. Here, clothing is simply a vehicle to access a larger dialogue about a diverse range of issues women face related to power and identity, including what expectations and limitations are placed upon them by their affiliation with a specific gender, culture, race, class, or profession. A complex spectrum of responses include discussions about the importance of clothing’s comfort and practicality, how clothing can facilitate women’s movement through class and social strata, how sex is used strategically in business and social settings, and how clothing can be used to empower women by connecting them with cultural or personal history.

            Complimented by 148 color and black-and-white photographs, the visual and written portraits in this book reveal much more than the contents of women’s closets. Through the intimate lens of clothing, Ludwig and Piechocki expose the very personal ways that power is sought, experienced, and projected by women.

 

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cover of Visualizing Latinx: Creative Practices in Fashion, Film, and Beyond

Visualizing Latinx

Creative Practices in Fashion, Film, and Beyond

Arlene Dávila

Duke University Press, 2026

Visualizing Latinx elevates the stories of contemporary Latinx creators working in fashion, independent filmmaking, and public art who confront the systemic erasure of Latinx creativity. Arlene Dávila documents how these creatives strive to visualize their communities as a means of transforming society and asserting inclusion on their own terms. She highlights how these artists approach their work with purpose, intention, style, and ingenuity to showcase the value, joy, and complexity of Latinx identities. Looking to the academic sector as a sanctioning and uplifting force, Dávila also explores academia’s role in making Latinx histories and creative communities visible. By focusing on the inventive, transformative, and decolonial practices of Latinx artists and creatives, she argues that seeing and appreciating Latinx culture through visual media can be revolutionary in creating a more equitable and vibrant society for all.
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cover of Wearing Culture: Dress and Regalia in Early Mesoamerica and Central America

Wearing Culture

Dress and Regalia in Early Mesoamerica and Central America

Heather Orr

University Press of Colorado, 2014

Wearing Culture connects scholars of divergent geographical areas and academic fields—from archaeologists and anthropologists to art historians—to show the significance of articles of regalia and of dressing and ornamenting people and objects among the Formative period cultures of ancient Mesoamerica and Central America.

Documenting the elaborate practices of costume, adornment, and body modification in Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, Oaxaca, the Soconusco region of southern Mesoamerica, the Gulf Coast Olmec region (Olman), and the Maya lowlands, this book demonstrates that adornment was used as a tool for communicating status, social relationships, power, gender, sexuality, behavior, and political, ritual, and religious identities. Despite considerable formal and technological variation in clothing and ornamentation, the early indigenous cultures of these regions shared numerous practices, attitudes, and aesthetic interests. Contributors address technological development, manufacturing materials and methods, nonfabric ornamentation, symbolic dimensions, representational strategies, and clothing as evidence of interregional sociopolitical exchange.

Focusing on an important period of cultural and artistic development through the lens of costuming and adornment, Wearing Culture will be of interest to scholars of pre-Hispanic and pre-Columbian studies.

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cover of Weaving Identities: Construction of Dress and Self in a Highland Guatemala Town

Weaving Identities

Construction of Dress and Self in a Highland Guatemala Town

By Carol Hendrickson

University of Texas Press, 1995

Traje, the brightly colored traditional dress of the highland Maya, is the principal visual expression of indigenous identity in Guatemala today. Whether worn in beauty pageants, made for religious celebrations, or sold in tourist markets, traje is more than "mere cloth"—it plays an active role in the construction and expression of ethnicity, gender, education, politics, wealth, and nationality for Maya and non-Maya alike.

Carol Hendrickson presents an ethnography of clothing focused on the traje—particularly women's traje—of Tecpán, Guatemala, a bi-ethnic community in the central highlands. She covers the period from 1980, when the recent round of violence began, to the early 1990s, when Maya revitalization efforts emerged.

Using a symbolic analysis informed by political concerns, Hendrickson seeks to increase the value accorded to a subject like weaving, which is sometimes disparaged as "craft" or "women's work." She examines traje in three dimensions—as part of the enduring images of the "Indian," as an indicator of change in the human life cycle and cloth production, and as a medium for innovation and creative expression.

From this study emerges a picture of highland life in which traje and the people who wear it are bound to tradition and place, yet are also actively changing and reflecting the wider world. The book will be important reading for all those interested in the contemporary Maya, the cultural analysis of material culture, and the role of women in culture preservation and change.

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cover of Weaving a Future: Tourism, Cloth, and Culture on an Andean Island

Weaving a Future

Tourism, Cloth, and Culture on an Andean Island

Elayne Zorn

University of Iowa Press, 2004

 The people of Taquile Island on the Peruvian side of beautiful Lake Titicaca, the highest navigable lake in the Americas, are renowned for the hand-woven textiles that they both wear and sell to outsiders. One thousand seven hundred Quechua-speaking peasant farmers, who depend on potatoes and the fish from the lake, host the forty thousand tourists who visit their island each year. Yet only twenty-five years ago, few tourists had even heard of Taquile. In Weaving a Future: Tourism, Cloth, and Culture on an Andean Island, Elayne Zorn documents the remarkable transformation of the isolated rocky island into a community-controlled enterprise that now provides a model for indigenous communities worldwide.

Over the course of three decades and nearly two years living on Taquile Island, Zorn, who is trained in both the arts and anthropology, learned to weave from Taquilean women. She also learned how gender structures both the traditional lifestyles and the changes that tourism and transnationalism have brought. In her comprehensive and accessible study, she reveals how Taquileans used their isolation, landownership, and communal organizations to negotiate the pitfalls of globalization and modernization and even to benefit from tourism. This multi-sited ethnography set in Peru, Washington, D.C., and New York City shows why and how cloth remains central to Andean society and how the marketing of textiles provided the experience and money for Taquilean initiatives in controlling tourism.

The first book about tourism in South America that centers on traditional arts as well as community control, Weaving a Future will be of great interest to anthropologists and scholars and practitioners of tourism, grassroots development, and the fiber arts.

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cover of meXicana Fashions: Politics, Self-Adornment, and Identity Construction

meXicana Fashions

Politics, Self-Adornment, and Identity Construction

Edited by Aída Hurtado and Norma E. Cantú

University of Texas Press, 2020

2020 Second Place, Best Nonfiction Multi Author, International Latino Book Awards

Collecting the perspectives of scholars who reflect on their own relationships to particular garments, analyze the politics of dress, and examine the role of consumerism and entrepreneurialism in the production of creating and selling a style, meXicana Fashions examines and searches for meaning in these visible, performative aspects of identity.

Focusing primarily on Chicanas but also considering trends connected to other Latin American communities, the authors highlight specific constituencies that are defined by region (“Tejana style,” “L.A. style”), age group (“homie,” “chola”), and social class (marked by haute couture labels such as Carolina Herrera and Oscar de la Renta). The essays acknowledge the complex layers of these styles, which are not mutually exclusive but instead reflect a range of intersections in occupation, origin, personality, sexuality, and fads. Other elements include urban indigenous fashion shows, the shifting quinceañera market, “walking altars” on the Days of the Dead, plus-size clothing, huipiles in the workplace, and dressing in drag. Together, these chapters illuminate the full array of messages woven into a vibrant social fabric.

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