Fashion and Its Social Agendas

Author: Diana Crane
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226924831
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 353

Book Description
It has long been said that clothes make the man (or woman), but is it still true today? If so, how has the information clothes convey changed over the years? Using a wide range of historical and contemporary materials, Diana Crane demonstrates how the social significance of clothing has been transformed. Crane compares nineteenth-century societies—France and the United States—where social class was the most salient aspect of social identity signified in clothing with late twentieth-century America, where lifestyle, gender, sexual orientation, age, and ethnicity are more meaningful to individuals in constructing their wardrobes. Today, clothes worn at work signify social class, but leisure clothes convey meanings ranging from trite to political. In today's multicode societies, clothes inhibit as well as facilitate communication between highly fragmented social groups. Crane extends her comparison by showing how nineteenth-century French designers created fashions that suited lifestyles of Paris elites but that were also widely adopted outside France. By contrast, today's designers operate in a global marketplace, shaped by television, film, and popular music. No longer confined to elites, trendsetters are drawn from many social groups, and most trends have short trajectories. To assess the impact of fashion on women, Crane uses voices of college-aged and middle-aged women who took part in focus groups. These discussions yield fascinating information about women's perceptions of female identity and sexuality in the fashion industry. An absorbing work, Fashion and Its Social Agendas stands out as a critical study of gender, fashion, and consumer culture. "Why do people dress the way they do? How does clothing contribute to a person's identity as a man or woman, as a white-collar professional or blue-collar worker, as a preppie, yuppie, or nerd? How is it that dress no longer denotes social class so much as lifestyle? . . . Intelligent and informative, [this] book proposes thoughtful answers to some of these questions."-Library Journal

The First Book of Fashion

Author: Ulinka Rublack
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1474249906
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 421

Book Description
This captivating book reproduces arguably the most extraordinary primary source documents in fashion history. Providing a revealing window onto the Renaissance, they chronicle how style-conscious accountant Matthäus Schwarz and his son Veit Konrad experienced life through clothes, and climbed the social ladder through fastidious management of self-image. These bourgeois dandies' agenda resonates as powerfully today as it did in the sixteenth century: one has to dress to impress, and dress to impress they did. The Schwarzes recorded their sartorial triumphs as well as failures in life in a series of portraits by illuminists over 60 years, which have been comprehensively reproduced in full color for the first time. These exquisite illustrations are accompanied by the Schwarzes' fashion-focussed yet at times deeply personal captions, which render the pair the world's first fashion bloggers and pioneers of everyday portraiture. The First Book of Fashion demonstrates how dress – seemingly both ephemeral and trivial – is a potent tool in the right hands. Beyond this, it colorfully recaptures the experience of Renaissance life and reveals the importance of clothing to the aesthetics and every day culture of the period. Historians Ulinka Rublack's and Maria Hayward's insightful commentaries create an unparalleled portrait of sixteenth-century dress that is both strikingly modern and thorough in its description of a true Renaissance fashionista's wardrobe. This first English translation also includes a bespoke pattern by TONY award-winning costume designer and dress historian Jenny Tiramani, from which readers can recreate one of Schwarz's most elaborate and politically significant outfits.

Literature Lost

Author: John Martin Ellis
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300075793
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 274

Book Description
In the span of less than a generation, university humanities departments have experienced an almost unbelievable reversal of attitudes, now attacking and undermining what had previously been considered best and most worthy in the Western tradition. John M. Ellis here scrutinizes the new regime in humanistic studies. He offers a careful, intelligent analysis that exposes the weaknesses of notions that are fashionable in humanities today. In a clear voice, with forceful logic, he speaks out against the orthodoxy that has installed race, gender, and class perspectives at the center of college humanities curricula. Ellis begins by showing that political correctness is a recurring impulse of Western society and one that has a discouraging history. He reveals the contradictions and misconceptions that surround the new orthodoxy and demonstrates how it is most deficient just where it imagines itself to be superior. Ellis contends that humanistic education today, far from being historically aware, relies on anachronistic thinking; far from being skeptical of Western values, represents a ruthless and unskeptical Western extremism; far from being valuable in bringing political perspectives to bear, presents politics that are crude and unreal; far from being sophisticated in matters of "theory," is largely ignorant of the range and history of critical theory; far from valuing diversity, is unable to respond to the great sweep of literature. In a concluding chapter, Ellis surveys the damage that has been done to higher education and examines the prospects for change.

Wearing the Trousers

Author: Don Chapman
Publisher: Amberley Publishing Limited
ISBN: 144566951X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 531

Book Description
The story of women's liberation as told by their changing dress – in the public gaze and in private

The Transformation of the Avant-Garde

Author: Diana Crane
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226117901
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 241

Book Description
Discusses the social aspects of art, popular culture as art, galleries, museums, and the meaning of art.

Dressing Global Bodies

Author: Beverly Lemire
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351028723
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 328

Book Description
Dressing Global Bodies addresses the complex politics of dress and fashion from a global perspective spanning four centuries, tying the early global to more contemporary times, to reveal clothing practice as a key cultural phenomenon and mechanism of defining one’s identity. This collection of essays explores how garments reflect the hierarchies of value, collective and personal inclinations, religious norms and conversions. Apparel is now recognized for its seminal role in global, colonial and post-colonial engagements and for its role in personal and collective expression. Patterns of exchange and commerce are discussed by contributing authors to analyse powerful and diverse colonial and postcolonial practices. This volume rejects assumptions surrounding a purportedly all-powerful Western metropolitan fashion system and instead aims to emphasize how diverse populations seized agency through the fashioning of dress. Dressing Global Bodies contributes to a growing scholarship considering gender and race, place and politics through the close critical analysis of dress and fashion; it is an indispensable volume for students of history and especially those interested in fashion, textiles, material culture and the body across a wide time frame.

Agenda for Social Justice

Author: Glenn Muschert
Publisher: SSSP Agendas for Social Justice
ISBN: 1447354281
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 202

Book Description
Examining topics from criminal justice to media concerns, environmental problems, economic problems and issues concerning sexualities and gender, the 2020 agenda provides accessible insights into some of the most pressing social problems in the United States and proposes public policy responses to those problems.

Agenda

Author: Ron Sherkin
Publisher: Ron Sherkin
ISBN: 1999064305
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 398

Book Description
Jericho Asher’s been a spy for longer than he cares to remember but after the death of a team member he decides enough is enough. So, he walks, vowing never to return. But now, after months off the grid, the Agency’s come calling. A leak has exposed their active undercover operatives, and Asher and his former partner, Haymishe Elfman, are the only assets they can rely on to secret an exiled Ukrainian minister back into the country to supplant the sitting president. Against his better judgment, Asher agrees to deliver the “package.” However, he’s surprised to learn that he and Haymishe will have help from an unlikely ally—Chinese MSS agent, Natasha Lee. Asher suspects Tasha has her own agenda for joining the team, however everybody is caught off guard when they are all betrayed. Now Asher and his mishmash team must go over the line to extract some answers and exact some revenge.

Tigersprung

Author: Ulrich Lehmann
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262621717
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 586

Book Description
The history of modernity written as a philosophy if fashion, set in the cultural framework of Paris.

Clothing and Its Connotations in Postmodern American Fiction

Author: Theresa Wenzel
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 3640175026
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 89

Book Description
Thesis (M.A.) from the year 2007 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 1,0, University of G ttingen, 25 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: Clothes, as Diana Crane establishes in her book Fashion and Its Social Agendas, "are a major tool in the construction of identity, offering a wide range of choices for the expression of lifestyles or subcultural identities" (171). However: "Social scientists have not articulated a definitive interpretation of how a person constructs social identity in contemporary society" (Crane 2). This might be one of the reasons why clothing has found its way into fiction, contributing to the characterization of protagonists and fictional world alike. The versatility of postmodern texts makes the analysis of clothing in connection with the process of constructing identities especially rewarding. The term postmodernism is hard to define. In the preface to his book The Illusions of Postmodernism Terry Eagleton makes a distinction between postmodernism and postmodernity: The word postmodernism generally refers to a form of contemporary culture, whereas the term postmodernity alludes to a specific historical period. Postmodernity is a style of thought which is suspicious of classical notions of truth, reason, identity and objectivity, of the idea of universal progress or emancipation, of single frameworks, grand narratives or ultimate grounds of explanation. (vii) Postmodernism, then, reflects these notions in what Eagleton calls "a depthless, decentred, ungrounded, self-reflexive, playful, derivative, eclectic, pluralistic art which blurs the boundaries between 'high' and 'popular' culture, as well as between art and everyday experience" (vii). Although his definition is not in favor of postmodernism, it does indicate how diverse subject-matter as well as style in postmodern texts can be. In other words, "anything goes" (Mayer 543).