Fashion And Materiality

Fashion is intimately tied to the material world. With a focus on diverse cultural practices, this book offers new insights into the dynamic relationships between fashion, bodies, and material culture. In a series of original case studies, both historical and contemporary, the collection explores how fashion and clothing affect articulations of body and self, experiences of time and place, and the shaping of social and local/global relationships. With chapters from leading international scholars, Fashion and Materiality takes the reader from the study of clothing and biography, and an early modern “foreign dress” collection, to Chinoiserie clothing in 18th-century Europe and fast fashion production in today's China. The book also examines fashion's role in nation building, and entanglements between fashion and migration across clothing donations for Syrian refugees in Germany and the circulation of “refugee chic” on international fashion runways. Scrutinizing the dense connections between fashion, clothing, materiality, and humanity, the book shows how the material interacts forcefully with the personal and political.

Fashion is intimately tied to the material world. With a focus on diverse cultural practices, this book offers new insights into the dynamic relationships between fashion, bodies, and material culture. In a series of original case studies, both historical and contemporary, the collection explores how fashion and clothing affect articulations of body and self, experiences of time and place, and the shaping of social and local/global relationships. With chapters from leading international scholars, Fashion and Materiality takes the reader from the study of clothing and biography, and an early modern “foreign dress” collection, to Chinoiserie clothing in 18th-century Europe and fast fashion production in today's China. The book also examines fashion's role in nation building, and entanglements between fashion and migration across clothing donations for Syrian refugees in Germany and the circulation of “refugee chic” on international fashion runways. Scrutinizing the dense connections between fashion, clothing, materiality, and humanity, the book shows how the material interacts forcefully with the personal and political.

A cultural and historical philosophy of fashion in economic and social life from the 1830s to the present day Ulrich Lehmann brings together methods and ideas from social sciences and material production to offer a new political reading of fashion in today's post-democracy. Accessing rare source material across a wide range of European languages and cultures, he offers insight into new working structures in the manufacture of garments and textiles.

The study of material culture demonstrates that objects make people just as much as people make, exchange and consume objects. But what if these objects are, in the eyes of others, only fakes? What kind of material mirror are people looking into? Are their real selves really reflected in this mirror? This book provides an original and revealing study into engagements with objects that are not what they are claimed and presumed to be and, subsequently, are believed to betray their makers as well as users. Drawing upon an ethnography of fake branded garments in Turkey and Romania, Material Culture and Authenticity shows how people can make authentic positions for themselves in and through fake objects. The book will be of interest to students and scholars working in the fields of anthropology, material culture and cultural studies as well as to general readers interested in ethnographic alternatives to biographies of famous fakers and fakes.

The Handbook of Fashion Studies identifies an innovative spectrum of thematic approaches, key strands and interdisciplinary concepts that continue to push forward the boundaries of fashion studies. The book is divided into seven sections: Fashion, Identity and Difference; Spaces of Fashion; Fashion and Materiality; Fashion, Agency and Policy; Science, Technology and New fashion; Fashion and Time and, Sustainable Fashion in a Globalised world. Each section consists of approximately four essays authored by established researchers in the field from the UK, USA, Netherlands, Sweden, Canada and Australia. The essays are written by international subject specialists who each engage with their section's theme in the light of their own discipline and provide clear case-studies to further knowledge on fashion. This consistency provides clarity and permits comparative analysis. The handbook will be essential reading for students of fashion as well as professionals in the industry.

This book puts the material back into clothing. In recent years social scientists have become increasingly interested in theories of fashion, but have rarely directly addressed the material qualities of clothing. By contrast, traditional studies of dress have focused on textiles but often neglect the larger cultural context within which dress becomes consumed as clothing. This book fills a major gap by combining these two 'camps' through an expressly material culture approach to clothing. In sustained case studies, Kchler and Miller argue that cloth and clothing are living, vibrant parts of culture and the body. From the recycling of cloth in Africa and India and the use of pattern in the Pacific, to the history of 'wash and wear' and why women wear the wrong clothes to restaurants in London, this book shows the considerable advantage gained by seamlessly combining material and social aspects of dress and textiles.

A cultural and historical philosophy of fashion in economic and social life from the 1830s to the present day Ulrich Lehmann brings together methods and ideas from social sciences and material production to offer a new political reading of fashion in today's post-democracy. Accessing rare source material across a wide range of European languages and cultures, he offers insight into new working structures in the manufacture of garments and textiles.

An interdisciplinary collection illuminating how fashion shaped concepts and practices of femininity and modernity