Fashion And Contemporaneity

This book represents the voices of scholars, fashion designers, bloggers and artists, which speak to the pervasive nature of fashion in matters of politics, history, economics, sociology, religion, art and identity in the twenty-first century.

A groundbreaking feminist perspective on Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) rule in Bolivia and the country’s radical transformation under Evo Morales The presidency of Evo Morales in Bolivia (2006–2019) has produced considerable academic scholarship, much of it focused on indigenous social movements or extractivism, and often triumphalist about the successes of Morales’s Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS). Turning a new lens on the movement, Cash, Clothes, and Construction presents the first gender-based analysis of “pluri-economy,” a central pillar of Bolivia’s program under Morales, evaluating the potential of this vision of “an economy where all economies fit” to embrace feminist critiques of capitalism and economic diversity. Based on more than twelve years of empirical research exploring the remarkable transformations in Bolivia since 2006, this book focuses on three sectors—finance, clothing, and construction—in which indigenous women have defied gendered expectations. Kate Maclean presents detailed case studies of women selling secondhand high street clothes from the United States in the vast, peri-urban markets of Bolivian cities; Aymaran designers of new pollera (traditional Andean dress) fashions, one of whom exhibited her collection in New York City; and the powerful and rich chola paceña, whose real estate investments have transformed the cultural maps of La Paz and El Alto. Cash, Clothes, and Construction offers a gendered analysis of the mission of MAS to dismantle neoliberalism and decolonize politics and economy from the perspective of the Indigenous women who have radically transformed Bolivia’s economy from the ground up.

Revealing how a modern notion of fashion helped to transform the novel and its representation of social change and individual and collective life in nineteenth-century Britain, Lauren Gillingham offers a revisionist history of the novel. With particular attention to the fiction of the 1820s through 1840s, this study focuses on novels that use fashion's idiom of currency and obsolescence to link narrative form to a heightened sense of the present and the visibility of public life. It contends that novelists steeped their fiction in date-stamped matters of dress, manners, and media sensations to articulate a sense of history as unfolding not in epochal change, but in transient issues and interests capturing the public's imagination. Reading fiction by Mary Shelley, Letitia Landon, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, W. H. Ainsworth, Charles Dickens, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and others, Fashionable Fictions tells the story of a nineteenth-century genre commitment to contemporaneity that restyles the novel itself.

The first full-length book devoted to Japan's 1994 Nobel Laureate, The Marginal World of Kenzaburo Ôe introduces the literary universe bursting with the explosive energies of Bakhtinian grotesque realism. In its center stands the "idiot son," a trickster and soulful healer, unknowingly thrown into the world of myth-making and history. The diverse voices of Ôe's characters resonate with one another within and between reinvented texts as the book's analysis flow into the very pores and veins of his masterful writing.

These conference proceedings are the output of one of the first academic events of its nature happening globally, targeting fashion from a communication sciences perspective, including, in a broad sense, cultural heritage studies and marketing. The chapters present theoretical and empirical interdisciplinary work on how various communication practices impact the fashion industry and on societal fashion-related practices and values. The special focus of this volume is how digital transformation is changing the field and its utility to practitioners. Using these academic insights, practitioners can understand the core causes and reasons for trends and developments in the field of fashion communication and marketing.

This book represents the voices of scholars, fashion designers, bloggers and artists, which speak to the pervasive nature of fashion in matters of politics, history, economics, sociology, religion, art and identity in the twenty-first century.

The City of Manchester, once the birthplace of the 1st Industrial Revolution, is today a pioneering hub of the 4th Industrial Revolution (Industry 4.0), offering Industry 4.0 solutions in advanced materials, engineering, healthcare and social sciences. Indeed, the creation of some of the city’s greatest academic institutions was a direct outcome of the industrial revolution, so it was something of a homecoming that the Sustainable Smart Manufacturing (S2M) Conference was hosted by The University of Manchester in 2019. The conference was jointly organised by The University of Manchester, The University of Lisbon and The Polytechnic of Leiria – the latter two bringing in a wealth of expertise in how Industry 4.0 manifests itself in the context of sustainably evolving, deeply-rooted cities. S2M-2019 instigated the development of 61 papers selected for publication in this book on areas of Smart Manufacturing, Additive Manufacturing and Virtual Prototyping, Materials for Healthcare Applications and Circular Economy, Design Education, and Urban Spaces.

Attitudes to fashion have changed radically in the twenty-first century. Dress is increasingly approached as a means of self-expression, rather than as a signifier of status or profession, and designers are increasingly treated as 'artists', as fashion moves towards art and enters the gallery, museum, and retail space. This book is the first to fully explore the causes and implications of this shift, examining the impact of technological innovation, globalization, and the growth of the internet. The End of Fashion focuses on the ways in which our understanding of fashion and the fashion system have transformed as mass mediation and digitization continue to broaden the way that contemporary fashion is perceived and consumed. Exploring everything from the rise of online shopping to the emergence of bloggers as power elites who have revolutionized the terrain of traditional fashion reportage, this volume anatomizes a world in which runway shows now compete with live-streaming, digital fashion films, Instagram, and Pinterest. Bringing together original, cutting-edge contributions from leading international scholars, this book is essential reading for students and scholars of fashion and cultural studies, as well as anyone interested in exploring the dramatic shifts that have shaken the fashion world this century – and what they might say about larger changes within an increasingly global and digital society.