Over the last forty years or so academic interest in fashion has burgeoned, and, since the 1970s at least, attempts to define, analyse, and critically explain fashion phenomena have become vital areas of research and study in almost all disciplines within the humanities and social sciences.
As serious academic work on and around the theory and practice of fashion continues to flourish as never before, this new title in the Routledge Major Works series, Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies, meets the need for an authoritative reference work to make sense of a rapidly growing and ever more complex corpus of literature, and to provide a map of the area as it has emerged and developed. It is a landmark collection of foundational and the best cutting-edge scholarship in the field and is organized in four volumes.
What is meant by fashion? Volume I provides a conspectus of some of the most important definitions and philosophies of fashion. The philosophical sources of the various senses of the word ‘fashion’ in the work of Kant and Adam Smith, for example, are represented here.
Volume II examines the many ways in which analysts have tried to make sense of the incredible variety of things that people wear. One of the simplest ways of doing this is to describe and classify those things. A slightly more sophisticated approach has been to attempt an analysis of them. Volume II presents the best of both the descriptive and analytical approaches to the understanding of fashion.
In addition to describing and analysing fashion, many scholars and other thinkers have tried to account for the very possibility of fashion. The critical task of explaining what makes fashion possible may be described as answering the question ‘Why does this item of clothing look the way it does?’ and it demands social, cultural, economic, and political answers. Volume III, therefore, collects the pre-eminent and most influential work to explore and explain what people wear.
From whence does our individual and personal identity spring? Is it even appropriate, in an age of mass fashion, to think of ourselves as having individual identities? Volume IV gathers the essential scholarship which addresses these and other hotly contested questions about identity, image, and performance that are raised by postmodern critical analyses of fashion.
Fashion is fully indexed and has a comprehensive introduction, newly written by the editor, which places the collected material in its historical and intellectual context. It is an essential work of reference and is destined to be valued by scholars and students as a vital one-stop research and pedagogic resource.
Volume I: Definitions and Philosophies
Part 1: Definitions
1. Lars Svendsen, ‘A Philosophy of Fashion?’, Fashion: A Philosophy (Reaktion Books, 2006), pp. 9–20.
2. Ted Polhemus and Lynn Proctor, Fashion and Anti Fashion (Thames and Hudson, 1978), pp. 12–29.
3. Fred Davis, Antifashion: The Vicissitudes of Negation, Fashion Culture and Identity (Chicago University Press, 1991), pp. 159–89.
4. Quentin Bell, On Human Finery (Alison and Busby, 1947), pp. 57–89.
Part 2: Fashion and Philosophy
5. Immanuel Kant, ‘Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View’.
6. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (extract).
7. Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus (extracts).
8. Wittgenstein, ‘Wittgenstein’s Tailor’, Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief (Basil Blackwell, 1966), pp. 4–10.
9. Karen Hanson, ‘Fashion and Philosophy’, in Michael Kelly (ed.), Encyclopedia of Aesthetics (Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 157–61.
10. Gilles Lipovetsky, ‘Introduction’, The Empire of Fashion: Dressing a Modern Democracy (Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. 55–88.
11. Pappas, ‘Fashion Seen as Something Imitative and Foreign’, British Journal of Aesthetics, 2008, 48, 1, 1–3.
12. Jacques Derrida, ‘Le Facteur de la Vérité’, La Carte Postale (Chicago University Press, 1987), pp. 413–19.
Part 3: Fashion: Art and Design
13. Zandra Rhodes and Alice Rawsthorn, ‘Is Fashion a True Art Form?’, The Observer, 13 July 2003.
14. Sanda Miller, ‘Fashion as Art: Is Fashion Art?’, Fashion Theory, 2007, 11, 1, 25–40.
15. Peter Wollen, ‘Addressing the Century’, Addressing the Century: 100 Years of Art and Fashion (Hayward Gallery, 1998), pp. 6–19.
Part 4: Utopianisms
16. Thomas More, Utopia (1516) (extract).
17. Aileen Ribiero, ‘Utopian Dress’, in Ash and Wilson (eds.) Chic Thrills (Pandora, 1992), pp. 225–37.
Part 5: Dress Reforms
18. Patricia A. Cunningham, ‘The Invisibles: Hygienic Underwear, "Dress Systems", and Making Fashion Rational’, Reforming Women’s Fashion, 1850–1920: Politics, Health and Art (Kent State University Press, 2003), pp. 75–82, 92–7.
19. ‘On Fashion’, The Rational Dress Society’s Gazette, 1888, 3, 2–4.
20. ‘A Gossip about Dress Reform’, The Rational Dress Society’s Gazette, 1889, 4, 2–4.
Part 6: Religious Opinions
21. Malcolm D. Brown ‘Multiple Meanings of the "Hijab" in Contemporary France’, in Keenan (ed.), Dressed to Impress: Looking the Part (Berg, 2001), pp. 105–21.
22. Susan O. Michelman, ‘From Habit to Fashion: Dress of Catholic Women’, in Damhorst, Miller, and Michelman (eds.), The Meanings of Dress (Fairchild, 1999), pp. 483–9.
Part 7: Health and Sport
23. Christopher Breward, ‘Reflection on the Histories of Sport and Fashion’, Fashion v. Sport (exhibition catalogue, July–November 2008), pp. 17–38.
24. Fred Schroeder, ‘Feminine Hygiene, Fashion and the Emancipation of American Women’, American Studies, 1976, XVIII, 2, 101–10.
Volume II: Description and Analysis
Part 8: Anthropological Approaches
25. Mary Ellen Roach and Joanne Bubolz Eicher, ‘The Language of Personal Adornment’, in J. M. Cordwell and R. A. Schwartz (eds.), The Fabrics of Culture: The Anthropology of Clothing and Adornment (Mouton de Gruyter, 1979), pp. 7–21.
Part 9: Functionalist Approaches
26. John Flügel, ‘Protection’, The Psychology of Clothes (Hogarth Press, 1950), pp. 68–83.
27. Elizabeth Rouse, ‘Why Do People Wear Clothes?’, Understanding Fashion (Blackwell, 1989), pp. 1–18.
Part 10: Fashion Writing and Journalism
28. Laird O’Shea Borrelli, ‘Dressing Up and Talking About It: Fashion Writing in Vogue from 1968–1993’, Fashion Theory, 1997, 1, 3, 247–60.
29. Holly Brubach, ‘For Better or For Worse?’, A Dedicated Follower of Fashion (Phaidon, 1999), pp. 94–104.
30. Alex Bilmes, ‘All Star Line Up’, Independent on Sunday, 15 April 2007.
Part 11: Trickle-Up/Down/Across
31. Ted Polhemus, Streetstyle (Thames and Hudson, 1994), pp. 8–12.
32. Charles W. King, ‘Fashion Adoption: A Rebuttal to the "Trickle-down" Theory’, in S. A. Greyser (ed.), Toward Scientific Marketing (American Marketing Association, 1963), pp. 108–25.
33. M. P. Grindereng, ‘Fashion Diffusion’, Journal of Home Economics, 1967, 59, 171–4.
Part 12: Semiological Approaches
34. Umberto Eco, ‘Social Life as Sign System’, in D. Robery (ed.), Structuralism: An Introduction (Oxford University Press, 1972).
35. Malcolm Barnard, ‘Fashion Statements: Communication and Culture’, in Ron Scapp and Brian Seitz, Fashion Statements (SUNY Press, 2007) (extract).
36. Colin Campbell, ‘When the Meaning is not a Message: A Critique on the Consumption as Communication Thesis’, in M. Nava et al. (eds.), Buy This Book: Studies in Advertising and Consumption (Routledge, 1997).
37. Fred Davis, ‘Do Clothes Speak? What Makes Them Fashion?’, Fashion Culture and Identity (Chicago University Press, 1991), pp. 1–19.
Part 13: Film and Television Studies
38. Stella Bruzzi, ‘Cinema and Haute Couture’, Undressing Cinema: Clothing and Identity in the Movies (Routledge, 1997), pp. 3–34.
39. Jane M. Gaines ‘On Wearing the Film: Madam Satan (1930)’, in Bruzzi and Church Gibson (eds.), Fashion Cultures (Routledge, 2000), pp. 159–77.
Part 14: Beauty/Aesthetics
40. Plato, ‘Greater Hippias’.
41. Anne Hollander, ‘Drapery’, Seeing Through Clothes (University of California Press, 1993), pp. 2–26.
42. Pappas, ‘Fashion Seen As Something Imitative and Foreign’, British Journal of Aesthetics, 2008, 48, 1, 7–12.
43. Jean Baudrillard ‘On Beauty’, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign (Telos Press, 1981), pp. 78–9.
Part 15: Looking/The Gaze
44. John Berger, Ways of Seeing (Penguin, 1972), pp. 45–64.
45. Suzanne Moore ‘Here’s Looking at You, Kid’, in Lorraine Gamman and Margaret Marshment, The Female Gaze (Women’s Press, 1988), pp. 44–59.
Part 16: History
46. Edward Sapir, ‘Fashion’, Selected Writings in Language, Culture and Personality (University of California Press, 1934), pp. 373–82.
47. Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, ‘Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory', Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory (Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 1–15.
48. Clare Lomas ‘"I Know Nothing About Fashion. There’s No Point In Interviewing Me"’, in Bruzzi and Church Gibson (eds.), Fashion Cultures (Routledge, 2000), pp. 363–71.
49. Gilles Lipovetsky, ‘A Century of Fashion’, The Empire of Fashion: Dressing Modern Democracy (Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. 55–88.
50. A. B. Young, ‘Fashion has its Laws’, Recurring Cycles of Fashion, 1760–1937 (Harper and Brothers Publishers, 1937), pp. 1–21.
51. Lou Taylor, ‘Dress History Debates from 1900’, Establishing Dress History (Manchester University Press, 2004), pp. 44–54.
Volume III: Critical Approaches
Part 17: Class and Politics
52. Angela Partington, ‘Popular Fashion and Working-Class Affluence’, in J. Ash and E. Wilson (eds.), Chic Thrills (Pandora, 1992).
53. Herbert Blumer, ‘Fashion: From Class Differentiation to Collective Selection’, Sociological Quarterly, 1969, 10, 275–91.
54. Diana Crane, ‘Working-Class Clothing and the Experience of Social Class in the Nineteenth Century’, Fashion and its Social Agendas (University of Chicago Press, 2000), pp. 26–48.
Part 18: Economics/Production
55. Peter Braham, ‘Fashion: Unpacking a Cultural Production’, in du Gay (ed.), Production of Culture/Cultures of Production (Open University Press, 1997), pp. 119–58.
56. Ben Fine and Ellen Leopold, ‘The Manufacture of the Fashion System’, The World of Consumption (Routledge, 1993), pp. 93–119.
Part 19: Economics/Consumption
57. Thorstein Veblen, ‘Dress as an Expression of the Pecuniary Culture’, Theory of the Leisure Class (Transaction Publishers, 1992), pp. 116–31.
58. Daniel Miller, ‘The Little Black Dress is the Solution, But what is the Problem?’, in K. M. Ekström and H. Brembeck (eds.), Elusive Consumption (Berg, 2004), pp. 113–27.
59. Tim Dant, ‘Consuming or Living With Things?/Wearing it Out’, Material Culture in the Social World (Open University Press, 1999).
Part 20: Culture
60. Pierre Bourdieu, ‘Haute Couture and Haute Culture’, Sociology in Question (Sage, 1984), pp. 132–8.
Part 21: Gender
61. Lee Wright, ‘Objectifying Gender: The Stiletto Heel’, in J. Attfield and P. Kirkham (eds.), A View From The Interior: Feminism, Women and Design (Women’s Press, 1989).
62. Tim Edwards, ‘Express Yourself: The Politics of Dressing Up’, Men in the Mirror (Cassell, 1997).
63. Iris Marion Young, ‘Women Recovering our Clothes, Perhaps’, in H. Silverman and D. Welton (eds.), Postmodernism and Continental Philosophy (SUNY Press, 1988), pp. 144–52.
64. Joanne Entwistle, ‘"Power Dressing" and the Construction of the Career Woman’, The Fashioned Body (Polity Press, 2000), pp. 6–40.
65. Adolf Loos, ‘Ladies’ Fashion’, Ornament and Crime (Ariadne Press, 1998), pp. 106–11.
Part 22: Ethnicity
66. Dick Hebdige, ‘White Skins, Black Masks’, Subculture (Routledge, 1979), pp. 54–9.
67. Emil Wilbekin, ‘Great Aspirations: Hip Hop and Fashion Dress for Excess and Success’, in Alan Light (ed.), The Vibe History of Hip Hop (Plexus Press, 1999).
68. Richard Majors and Janet Mancini Billson, ‘The Cool-Cat Lifestyle’, in Damhorst, Miller, and Michelman (eds.), The Meanings of Dress (Fairchild, 1999), pp. 400–3.
Part 23: Age
69. Cheryl Buckley, ‘Children’s Clothes: Design and Promotion’, in Pat Kirkham (ed.), The Gendered Object (Manchester University Press, 1996), pp. 103–11.
70. Jane E. Workman and Kim K. P. Johnson, ‘The Role of Clothing in Perpetuating Ageism’, Journal of Home Economics, 1989, 81, 3, 11–15.
Part 24: Subculture
71. Dick Hebdige ‘Style’, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (Routledge, 1979), pp. 54–9.
72. Caroline Evans, ‘Dreams That Only Money Can Buy … Or, The Shy Tribe in Flight From Discourse’, Fashion Theory, 1997, 1, 2, 169–88.
Part 25: Globalism/Colonialism
73. Jan Brand and Jose Teunissen, Global Fashion Local Tradition: On the Globalisation of Fashion (Terra Press, 2005), pp. 9–21.
74. Olga Gurova, ‘The Art of Dressing: Body, Gender, and Discourse on Fashion in Soviet Russia in the 1950s and 1960s’, in E. Paulicelli and H. Clark (eds.), The Fabric of Clothing (Routledge, 2009), pp. 73–91.
75. Margaret Maynard, ‘Theorising Global Dress’, Dress and Globalisation (Manchester University Press, 2004), pp. 15–31.
76. L. Skov, ‘Hong Kong Fashion Designers as Cultural Intermediaries: Out of Global Garment Production’, Cultural Studies, 2002, 16, 4, 553–69.
Part 26: Uniforms
77. Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter, ‘Uniforms and Uniformity’, The Rebel Sell (Capstone 2006), pp. 165–90.
78. Jennifer Craik, ‘The Cultural Politics of the Uniform’, Fashion Theory, 2003, 7, 2, 125–47.
79. Cheryl Herr, ‘Terrorist Chic: Style and Domination in Contemporary Ireland’, in S. Benstock and S. Ferris (eds.), On Fashion (Rutgers University Press, 1994), pp. 235–66.
Volume IV: Latter Days
Part 27: Performance/Identity
80. Doug Kellner, ‘Madonna, Fashion and Image’, Media Culture (Routledge, 1995), pp. 263–75, 285–7.
81. Noel McLaughlin, ‘Rock, Fashion and Performativity’, in Bruzzi and Church Gibson (eds.), Fashion Cultures (Routledge, 2000), pp. 264–85.
Part 28: Image/Imagery
82. Jennifer Craik, ‘Soft Focus: Techniques of Fashion Photography’, The Face of Fashion (Routledge 1994), pp. 92–114.
83. Rosetta Brookes, ‘Fashion Photography: The Double Page Spread: Helmut Newton, Guy Bourdin and Deborah Turbeville’, in Ash and Wilson (eds.), Chic Thrills (Pandora, 1992).
84. Martin Harrison, Appearances: Fashion Photography Since 1945 (Jonathan Cape, 1991), pp. 9–22.
85. Erica Lennard, ‘Doing Fashion Photographs’, in C. Di Grappa (ed.), Fashion Theory (Lustrum Press).
86. E. Sue Atkinson, ‘Advertising and Fashion Photography: A Short Survey’, British Journal of Photography, 1981, 20 March 1981, 300–13.
Part 29: Graphics and Fashion
87. Tamsin Blanchard, Fashion and Graphics (Lawrence King Publishing, 2004) (extracts).
88. Abbott Miller, ‘Through Thick and Thin: Fashion and Type’, Eye Magazine, 2007, 17, 65, 17–23.
Part 30: Modernism/ity
89. Elizabeth Wilson, Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity (I. B. Tauris, 1985), pp. 1–16.
90. Adolf Loos, ‘Men’s Fashion’, Ornament and Crime (Ariadne Press), pp. 39–44.
91. Ulrich Lehmann, ‘Benjamin and the Revolution of Fashion in Modernity’, Tigersprung: Fashion in Modernity (MIT Press, 2000).
92. Kurt Back, ‘Modernism and Fashion’, in M. R. Solomon (ed.), The Psychology of Fashion (Lexington Books, 1985).
93. Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (Faber and Faber, 1988), pp. 64–72, 161–9.
94. Andrew Hill ‘People Dress So Badly Nowadays’, in Breward and Evans (eds.), Fashion and Modernity (Berg, 2005), pp. 67–81.
Part 31: Postmodernism/ity
95. Jean Baudrillard, ‘Fashion, or The Enchanting Spectacle of The Code’, Symbolic Exchange and Death (Sage, 1993), pp. 87–101.
96. Caroline Evans, Fashion at the Edge (Yale University Press, 2003), pp. 275–307.
97. Alison Gill, ‘Deconstruction Fashion’, Fashion Theory, 1998, 2, 1, 25–50.
Part 32: The Body
98. Mario Perniola, ‘Between Clothing and Nudity’, in Michael Feher et al. (eds.), Fragments for a History of the Human Body (Zone, 1989), pp. 237–59.
99. Ruth Holliday, ‘The Comfort of Identity’, Sexualities, 1999, 2:4, 475–91.
100. Paul Sweetman, ‘Anchoring the (Postmodern) Self? Body Modification, Fashion and Identity’, Body and Society, 1999, 5, 2–3, 51–76.
101. Umberto Eco, ‘Lumbar Thought’, Faith in Fakes (Secker & Warburg, 1998).
102. Joanne Entwistle, ‘Addressing the Body’, The Fashioned Body (Polity Press, 2000).
Part 33: Fetish
103. Sigmund Freud, ‘Fetishism’, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XXI.
104. Valerie Steele, ‘Fashion and Fetish’, The Corset: A Cultural History (Yale University Press, 2003).
105. David Kunzle, ‘The Special Historic and Psychological Role of Tight-Lacing’, Fashion and Fetishism (Sutton Publishing, 2004).
106. Lorraine Gamman and Merja Makinen, Female Fetishism: A New Look (Lawrence and Wishart, 1994) (extract).
107. Roland Barthes, ‘Where the Garment Gapes’, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. R. Miller (Hill and Wang, 1975).
Part 34: Ecology/Environmental Concerns
108. Pietra Rivoli, ‘The History of American Cotton: Winning by Ducking the Labor Markets’, Travels of a T-shirt in the Global Economy (John Wiley, 2006), pp. 9–24.
109. Kate Fletcher, ‘Fashion, Needs and Consumption’, Sustainable Fashion and Design: Design Journeys (Earthscan Publications, 2008), pp. 117–34.
Biography
Malcolm Barnard is a senior lecturer in the history and theory of art and design at the University of Derby. His publications include Fashion as Communication, 2nd edn. (Routledge, 2002), Fashion Theory: A Reader (Routledge, 2007), Graphic Design as Communication (Routledge, 2005), and Approaches to Understanding Visual Culture (Palgrave, 2001).
