London Sartorial

The new looks, updated traditions, and influential designers defining men’s fashion today, from the world’s capital of gentlemen’s style. Combining the unique heritage of gentlemen’s tailoring with a progressive approach to street style, London is fast becoming the world’s capital of men’s fashion. For this book, Dylan Jones presents a discerning sartorialist’s guide to the capital, from London’s coolest neighborhoods to the studios of its most influential designers and beyond. Beginning with an exploration of London’s chicest urban villages, the book reflects the extraordinary eclecticism of the city’s street style—from envelope-pushing streetwear in Shoreditch to classic tailoring in Mayfair. Forays into the coolest and hardest-to-find menswear shops in the city at once reveal the sources of the fashions on display and capture the atmosphere of the capital. At the heart of the book are profiles of London’s top designers—from world renowned brands to up-and-coming names, these are the designers whose work is shaping the future of menswear. Legends such as Paul Smith and Vivienne Westwood, whose flair for subversion colors their refinement, sit alongside younger designers such as Christopher Shannon and Agi & Sam, pioneers of bringing graphics and pattern to luxury streetwear. Icons of classic elegance such as Tom Ford and Burberry contrast with a new generation of designers, from Nigel Cabourn to Mr. Hare, whose redefined silhouettes and innovative materials take the traditions of Savile Row into the new millennium.

Beginning with the premise that the biopic is a form of adaptation and an example of intermediality, this collection examines the multiplicity of 'source texts' and the convergence of different media in this genre, alongside the concurrent issues of fidelity and authenticity that accompany this form. The contributors focus on big and small screen biopics of British celebrities from the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries, attending to their myth-making and myth-breaking potential. Related topics are the contemporary British biopic's participation in the production and consumption of celebrated lives, and the biopic's generic fluidity and hybridity as evidenced in its relationship to such forms as the bio-docudrama. Offering case studies of film biographies of literary and cultural icons, including Elizabeth I, Elizabeth II, Diana Princess of Wales, John Lennon, Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Beau Brummel, Carrington and Beatrix Potter, the essays address how British identity and heritage are interrogated in the (re)telling and showing of these lives, and how the reimagining of famous lives for the screen is influenced by recent processes of manufacturing celebrity.

The untold story of Sammy Davis, Jr.: This incisive biography and sweeping cultural history conjures "the many worlds [Davis, Jr.] traversed, and shows how the issue of race, in his own mind and in the minds of his fans and detractors, shaped his career and life" (The New York Times). For decades one of America’s most recognizable stars, the real Sammy Davis, Jr. has long remained hidden behind the persona the performer so vigorously generated—and so fiercely protected. Here Wil Haygood brings Davis’s life into full relief against the backdrop of an America in the throes of racial change. He made his living entertaining white people but was often denied service in the very venues he played, and in his broad and varied friendships—not to mention his romances—Davis crossed racial lines in ways few others had. In Black and White vividly draws on painstaking research and more than two hundred and fifty interviews to trace Davis, Jr.’s journey from the vaudeville stage to Broadway, Hollywood, and, of course, Las Vegas. It is an important record of a vanished America—and of one of its greatest entertainers.

This lively survey of 150 years of fashion covers everything from Haute Couture to the High Street, and developing fabric technology from silk to fleece. From Coco Chanel to Armani and Alexander McQueen, Breward explores fashion as a cultural phenomenon. Breward examines the glamorous world of Vogue and advertising, the relationship between fashion and film, and fashion as a business, and goes beyond the surface to consider our interaction with fashion. How have our ideas about hygiene and comfort influenced the direction of style? How does our dress create our identity and status? Details of dandies, flappers, and punks are contained within a clear overview of the period which will make you look at your clothes in a different light.

"A guide to the press of the United Kingdom and to the principal publications of Europe, Australia, the Far East, Gulf States, and the U.S.A.

This is the first book to tell the story of the bebop subculture in London’s Soho, a subculture that emerged in 1945 and reached its pinnacle in 1950. In an exploration via the intersections of race, class and gender, it shows how bebop identities were constructed and articulated. Combining a wide range of archival research and theory, the book evocatively demonstrates how the scene evolved in Soho’s clubs, the fashion that formed around the music, drug usage amongst a contingent of the group, and the moral panic which led to the police raids on the clubs between 1947 and 1950. Thereafter it maps the changes in popular culture in Soho during the 1950s, and argues that the bebop story is an important precedent to the institutional harassment of black-related spaces and culture that continued in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This book therefore rewrites the first chapter of the ‘classic’ subcultural canon, and resets the subcultural clock; requiring us to rethink the periodization and social make-up of British post-war youth subcultures.

This book examines early modern drama's depiction of non-standard forms of masculinity grounded in superficiality, inauthenticity, affectation, and the display of the extravagantly clothed body. Practices of extravagant dress destabilized distinctions between able-bodied and disabled, human and non-human, and the past and present, distinctions that structure normative ways of thinking about sexuality. In city comedies by Ben Jonson, George Chapman, Thomas Middleton, and Thomas Dekker, extravagantly dressed male characters imagine alternatives to the prevailing modes of subjectivity, sociability, and eroticism in early modern London. While these characters are situated in hostile narrative and historical contexts, this book draws on recent work on disability, materiality, and queer temporality to rethink their relationship to those contexts in order to access the world-making possibilities of early modern queer style. In their rich representations of life in London around the turn of the seventeenth century, these plays not only were, but also remain, uniquely sensitive to the intersection of sexuality, urbanization, and material culture. The attachments and pleasures of early modern sartorial extravagance they depict can estrange us from the epistemologies that narrow current thinking about sexuality's relationship to authenticity, pedagogy, interiority, and privacy.

The Holy Grail is meant to grant eternal life, but it seems it’s going to be the death of me instead. Entrusted to the Circle, the Grail has been hidden for two thousand years. Now one by one, its guardians are turning up dead. Someone has betrayed them and exposed their identities to the world, and my best friend Murdoch is at the top of the list. With a curse to break, the Grail could be just what I’m looking for. The real question is… why has my friend been hiding it from me all these years? Half-Blood’s Quest is an adrenaline fuelled race to the finish line. Packed with magic, mythology, and mayhem, it’s a page-turner that will suck you in and not let go.