Fashion Theory: A Reader

Description

This thoroughly revised and updated edition of Fashion Theory: A Reader brings together and presents a wide range of essays on fashion theory that will engage and inform both the general reader and the specialist student of fashion. From apparently simple and accessible theories concerning what fashion is to seemingly more difficult or challenging theories concerning globalisation and new media, this collection contextualises different theoretical approaches to identify, analyse and explain the remarkable diversity, complexity and beauty of what we understand and experience every day as fashion and clothing. This second edition contains entirely new sections on fashion and sustainability, fashion and globalisation, fashion and digital/social media and fashion and the body/prosthesis. It also contains updated and revised sections on fashion, identity and difference, and on fashion and consumption and fashion as communication. More specifically, the section on identity and difference has been updated to include contemporary theoretical debates surrounding Islam and fashion, and LGBT+ communities and fashion and the section on consumption now includes theories of 'prosumption'. Each section has a specialist and dedicated Editor's Introduction which provides essential conceptual background, theoretical contextualisation and critical summaries of the readings in each section. Bringing together the most influential and ground breaking writers on fashion and exposing the ideas and theories behind what they say, this unique collection of extracts and essays brings to light the presuppositions involved in the things we all think and say about fashion. This second edition of Fashion Theory: A Reader is a timeless and invaluable resource for both the general reader and undergraduate students across a range of disciplines including sociology, cultural studies and fashion studies. Cover Half Title Series Page Title Page Copyright Page Contents List of figures List of table Preface to the second edition Introduction PART ONE Fashion and fashion theories Introduction 1 Explaining it Away 2 The Empire of Fashion: Introduction 3 Adorned in Zeitgeist 4 Haute Couture and Haute Culture PART TWO What fashion is and is not Introduction 5 Fashion 6 Art 7 Antifashion: The Vicissitudes of Negation 8 Fashion 9 Extract from Fashion and Anti Fashion PART THREE Fashion and (the) image Introduction 10 Fashion Photography 11 Going Beyond ‘The Fashion System’: A Critique 12 ‘Doing Fashion Photographs’ 13 Introduction: Aboud Sodano and Paul Smith PART FOUR Sustainable fashion Introduction 14 Consumers’ Perceptions of ‘Green’: Why and How Consumers Use Eco-Fashion and Green Beauty Products 15 Fashion, Needs and Consumption 16 Fashion and Sustainability: Repairing the Clothes we Wear PART FIVE Fashion as communication Introduction 17 Social Life as a Sign System 18 The Analysis of the Rhetorical System 19 Do Clothes Speak? What Makes them Fashion? 20 When the Meaning is not a Message: A Critique of the Consumption as Communication Thesis 21 “Fashion as Communication Revisited” PART SIX Fashion: identity and difference Introduction 22 Express Yourself: The Politics of Dressing Up 23 Objectifying Gender: The Stiletto Heel 24 ‘Power Dressing’ and the Construction of the Career Woman 25 From Gay to Queer – Or, Wasn’t Fashion Always Already a Very Queer Thing? 26 Lesbian Style: From Mannish Women to Lipstick Dykes 27 Popular Fashion and Working-Class Affluence 28 Fashion: From Class Differentiation to Collective Selection 29 Great Aspirations: Hip Hop and Fashion Dress for Excess and Success 30 Taste and Distinction: The Politics of Style 31 Islamic Fashions Cape 32 You Should Understand, It’s a Freedom Thing: The Stoned Cherrie–Steve Biko T-Shirt PART SEVEN Fashion, clothes and the body Introduction 33 Addressing the Body 34 Deviant Bodies and Suitable Clothes 35 “My Leg is a Giant Stiletto Heel”: Fashioning the Prosthetised Body 36 Fashion, Clothes and the Body PART EIGHT Fashion: production, consumption, prosumption Introduction 37 The Crossroad Between Production and Consumption 38 Consuming or Living with Things? Wearing it out 39 Reconceptualising Prosumption Beyond the ‘Cultural Turn’: Passive Fashion Prosumption in Korea and China 40 Attentiveness, Materials, and their use: The Stories of Never Washed, Perfect Piece and My Community 41 The Little Black Dress is the Solution, but what is the Problem? PART NINE Modern fashion Introduction 42 Adorned in Dreams: Introduction 43 Modernism and Fashion: A Social Psychological Interpretation 44 Public Roles/Personality in Public 45 Walter Benjamin: Fashion, Modernity and the City Street PART TEN Postmodern fashion Introduction 46 The Ideological Genesis of Needs/Fetishism and Ideology 47 Fashion, or the Enchanting Spectacle of the Code 48 A Tale of Inscription/Fashion Statements 49 Deconstruction Fashion: The Making of Unfinished, Decomposing and Re-Assembled Clothes PART ELEVEN Digital/new media and fashion Introduction 50 Narcissism, Femininity and Alienation 51 Personal Fashion Blogs: Screens and Mirrors in Digital Self-Portraits 52 Bringing Sexy Back: Reclaiming the Body Aesthetic Via Self-Shooting 53 Mediatization and Digital Media in the Field of Fashion PART TWELVE Global and transnational fashion Introduction 54 Globalization and Colonialism 55 Extract from Global Fashion Local Tradition 56 Transnational Commodity Flows and the Global Phenomenon of the Brand 57 The Art of Dressing: Body, Gender, and Discourse on Fashion in Soviet Russia in the 1950s and 1960s 58 Hong Kong Fashion Designers as Cultural Intermediaries: Out of Global Garment Production Index