This thoroughly revised and updated edition of Fashion Theory: A Reader brings together and presents a wide range of essays on fashion theory that will engage and inform both the general reader and the specialist student of fashion. From apparently simple and accessible theories concerning what fashion is to seemingly more difficult or challenging theories concerning globalisation and new media, this collection contextualises different theoretical approaches to identify, analyse and explain the remarkable diversity, complexity and beauty of what we understand and experience every day as fashion and clothing.
This second edition contains entirely new sections on fashion and sustainability, fashion and globalisation, fashion and digital/social media and fashion and the body/prosthesis. It also contains updated and revised sections on fashion, identity and difference, and on fashion and consumption and fashion as communication. More specifically, the section on identity and difference has been updated to include contemporary theoretical debates surrounding Islam and fashion, and LGBT+ communities and fashion and the section on consumption now includes theories of 'prosumption'. Each section has a specialist and dedicated Editor's Introduction which provides essential conceptual background, theoretical contextualisation and critical summaries of the readings in each section.
Bringing together the most influential and ground breaking writers on fashion and exposing the ideas and theories behind what they say, this unique collection of extracts and essays brings to light the presuppositions involved in the things we all think and say about fashion. This second edition of Fashion Theory: A Reader is a timeless and invaluable resource for both the general reader and undergraduate students across a range of disciplines including sociology, cultural studies and fashion studies.
"Introduction PART 1: Fashion and Fashion Theories Introduction 1. Elizabeth Wilson Explaining it Away 2. Gilles Lipovetsky The Empire of Fashion: Introduction 3. Barbara Vinken The Fashion Zeitgeist 4. Pierre Bourdieu Haute Couture and Haute Culture PART 2: What Fashion Is and Is Not Introduction 5. Edward Sapir Fashion 6. Nancy Troy Fashion as Art 7. Fred Davis Antifashion: The Vicissitudes of Negation 8. Georg Simmel The Philosophy of Fashion 9. Ted Polhemus and Lynn Procter Fashion and Antifashion PART 3: Fashion and (the) Image Introduction 10. Roland Barthes The Fashion System: Fashion Photography 11. Paul Jobling Going Beyond The Fashion System 12. Erica Lennard Doing Fashion Photographs 13. Tamsin Blanchard Fashion and Graphics: Introduction PART 4: Sustainable Fashion Introduction 14. Marie-Cécile Cervellon and Lindsey Carey Consumers' Perceptions of 'Green'' 15. Kate Fletcher Fashion, Needs and Consumption 16. Alison Gwilt Fashion and Sustainability: Repairing the Clothes We Wear PART 5: Fashion as Communication Introduction 17. Umberto Eco Social Life as a Sign System 18. Roland Barthes The Analysis of the Rhetorical System 19. Fred Davis Do Clothes Speak? What Makes them Fashion? 20. Colin Campbell When the Meaning is not a Message: A Critique of the Consumption as Communication Thesis 21. Malcolm Barnard Fashion as Communication Revisited PART 6: Fashion: Identity and Difference Introduction Gender 22. Tim Edwards Express Yourself: The Politics of Dressing Up 23. Lee Wright Objectifying Gender: The Stiletto Heel 24. Joanne Entwistle Power Dressing and The Construction of the Career Woman LGBT+ 25. Annamari Vänskä From Gay to Queer - Or, Wasn't Fashion Always Already A Very Queer Thing? 26. Adam Geczy and Vicki Karaminas Lesbian Style: From Mannish Women to Lipstick Dykes Social Class 27. Angela Partington Popular Fashion and Working-Class Affluence 28. Herbert Blumer Fashion: From Class Differentiation to Collective Selection Ethnicity and Race 29. Emil Wilbekin Great Aspirations: Hip Hop and Fashion Dress for Excess and Success 30. Reina Lewis Muslim Fashion: Taste and Distinction; The Politics of Style 31. Emma Tarlo Visibly Muslim: Islamic Fashion Scape 32. Carol Tulloch You Should Understand, It's a Freedom Thing: The Stoned Cherrie - Steve Biko T-Shirt PART 7: Fashion, Clothes and The Body Introduction 33. Joanne Entwistle Addressing the Body 34. Ingun Grimstad Klepp & Mari Rysst Deviant Bodies and Suitable Clothes 35. Laini Burton & Jana Melkumova-Reynolds 'My Leg is a Giant Stiletto Heel': Fashioning the Prosthetised Body 36. Malcolm Barnard Fashion, Clothes and The Body PART 8: Fashion: Production, Consumption, Prosumption Introduction 37. Marco Pedroni The Crossroad between Production and Consumption 38. Tim Dant Consuming or Living with Things? Wearing it Out 39. Tommy Tse and Ling Tung Tsang Reconceptualising Prosumption 40. Kate Fletcher Attentiveness, Materials, and Their Use 41. Daniel Miller The Little Black Dress is the Solution, but what is the Problem?"" PART 9: Modern Fashion Introduction 42. Elizabeth Wilson Adorned in Dreams: Introduction 43. Kurt Back Modernism and Fashion 44. Richard Sennett Public Roles/Personality in Public 45. Adam Geczy and Vicki Karaminas Walter Benjamin: Fashion, Modernity and the City Street PART 10: Post-modern Fashion Introduction 46. Jean Baudrillard The Ideological Genesis of Needs/Fetishism and Ideology 47. Jean Baudrillard Fashion, or the Enchanting Spectacle of the Code 48. Kim Sawchuk A Tale of Inscription: Fashion Statements 49. Alison Gill Deconstruction Fashion PART 11: Digital/New Media and Fashion Introduction 50. Sandra Lee Bartky Narcissism, Femininity and Alienation 51. Agnès Rocamora Personal Fashion Blogs 52. Katrin Tiidenberg Bringing Sexy Back: Reclaiming the Body Aesthetic via Self-Shooting 53. Agnès Rocamora Mediatization and Digital Media in the Field of Fashion PART 12: Global and Transnational Fashion Introduction 54. Malcolm Barnard Globalization and Colonialism 55. Jan Brand and Jose Teunissen From Global Fashion/Local Tradition 56. Ian Skoggard, Transnational Commodity Flows and the Global Phenomenon of the Brand 57. Olga Gurova Body, gender and discourse on fashion in Soviet Russia in the 1950s and 1960s 58. Lise Skov Hong Kong Fashion Designers as Cultural Intermediaries"
Malcolm Barnard is Senior Lecturer in Visual Culture at Loughborough University, UK.