1st Edition

The Places and Spaces of Fashion, 1800-2007

Edited By John Potvin Copyright 2009
    282 Pages
    by Routledge

    282 Pages
    by Routledge

    The Places and Spaces of Fashion, 1800-2007 brings together art, design, fashion, and a much neglected concern for its spatial realities. The spaces and places of fashion have often been overlooked in the writing of fashion history and visual culture. More often than not, however, these environments mitigate, control, inform, and enhance how fashion is experienced, performed, consumed, seen, exhibited, purchased, appreciated and of course displayed. Space, as this volume attempts to illustrate, is itself a representational strategy on par with and influencing the visibility and visuality of fashion. Innovative and challenging, the essays in this volume explore various physical and conceptual spaces, moving from physical environments to the two-dimensional with paintings, illustrations, and photographs to chart similarities, differences, and complex nuanced relationships between environments, fashion, identities, and visuality. The volume also navigates various sites (both permanent and temporary) of production, circulation, exhibition, consumption, and promotion of fashion that define meaning and knowledge about a culture or individual by providing for a bond between embodied consumers/spectators and fashion objects. The Places and Spaces of Fashion, 1800-2007 is a compelling project with a thematic, theoretical, and historiographic approach that is at once both focused yet far-reaching and original in its implications. The volume engages with questions attending to the ‘modern condition’ by seamlessly weaving interdisciplinary discussions of the visual with material culture to explore the spatial dimension(s) of fashion. Some of the essays explore new and exciting spaces while others offer compelling revisionary analyses of relatively known sources

    List of Figures

    Introduction: Inserting Fashion into Space

    John Potvin

    Part I: Picturing Fashion/Fashionable Pictures

    1. Tracking Fashions: Risking It All at the Hippodrome de Longchamp

    Heidi Brevik-Zender

    2. Framing the Victorians: Photography, Fashion and Identity

    Margaret Denny

    3. On the Golden Stairs: The Spectacle of the Victorian Woman in White

    Anne Anderson

    4. Maurice de Rothschild’s "Remembrances of Things Past": Costume Obsession and Decadence, the Collection of a Belle Époque Dandy

    Christopher Bedford

    Part II: Cultures of Display

    5. Fashion’s Chameleons: Camouflage, "Conspicuousness" and Gendered Display during WWI

    Allison Matthews David

    6. Making the Princeton Man: Collegiate Clothing and Campus Culture, 1900-1920

    Deidre Clemente

    7. Elegance and Spectacle in Berlin: The Gerson Fashion Store and the Rise of the Modern Fashion Show

    Mila Ganeva

    8. The City Boutique: Milan and the Spaces of Fashion

    Francesca Muscau

    9. Libertine Acts: Fashion and Furniture

    Peter McNeil

    Part III: Window Dressing and Boutique Culture

    10. Dressing Rooms: Women, Fashion and the Department Store

    Louisa Iarocci

    11. The Logic of the Mannequin: Shop Windows and the Realist Novel

    Vanessa Osborne

    12. Allure of the Silent Beauties: Mannequins and Display in America, 1935-1970

    Emily Klug

    13. "A House that is Made of Hats": The Lilly Daché Building 1937–1968

    Rebecca Jumper Matheson

    14. From "Paradise" to Cyberspace: The Revival of the Bourgeois Marketplace

    Elyssa Dimant

    15. Armani/Architecture: The Timelessness and Textures of Space

    John Potvin

    Notes on Contributors

    Index

    Biography

    John Potvin is Assistant Professor of Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century European Art. He is the author of Boundaries and Intimacy: Material and Visual Cultures Beyond Male Bonding, 1880-1914 (Ashgate, December 2007) and co-editor of the forthcoming Collecting Subjects in Britain, 1700-1914: The Visual Meanings and Pleasures of Material Culture (Ashgate).

    'Full of rich and rigourous new research, it will be of interest tomany historians, with its valuable insights on the spatially located visuality, performance and display of fashion' - The Journal of Design History.