Fashion is a gigantic global industry, generating some three hundred billion dollars in revenue every year, and playing a significant role in the economic, political, cultural and social lives of a vast international audience. Despite this, and perhaps in part because of its prevalence in the media, it is often denigrated as trivial and superficial, as a sign of vanity and narcissism. Written by a highly regarded authority on twentieth-century fashion, this Very Short Introduction offer a wide-ranging and revealing look at fashion that discusses everything from production and design, to couture and retailing, to the wider role of fashion in society. This lively book illuminates the structure of the fashion industry and the range of professionals involved in its creation, and it provides cogent insight into its historical, social and cultural contexts. It also sheds light on how fashion has developed, while raising questions about its ethical and controversial aspects, such as the use of fur, exploitative trading, and poor working conditions for laborers.

Fashion: A Very Short Introduction

Arts & Photography

Arnold, Rebecca

Graphic Design

Oxford University Press

Fashion, and the glossy magazines it inhabits, allow Western culture to dream. It permits a person to fantasize and to experiment with new identities. It flaunts glamour and success. Appearance becomes something to be perfected and admired.
These dreams and freedoms, Rebecca Arnold proposes, are contradictory. Fashion and its surrounding imagery elicit fear and anxiety in their consumers as well as pleasure. Fashion has come to incorporate the underside of modern life, with violence and decay becoming a dominant theme in clothing design and photography.
Arnold draws on diverse written sources to explore the complex nature of modern fashion. She discusses a range of key themes: how fashion uses and abuses the power of wealth; the alienating promotion of "good" taste; the power plays of sex and display; and how identities can be blurred to disguise and confuse. In order to unravel the contradictory emotions of desire and anxiety they provoke, she never loses sight of the historical and cultural contexts in which fashion designers and photographers perform.
Generously illustrated, Fashion, Desire and Anxiety focuses on the last thirty years, from photographic works of the 1970s to the beginning of the twenty-first century.

Fashion, Desire and Anxiety: Image and Morality in the Twentieth Century

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

Rutgers University Press

History

Historical Study & Educational Resources

The first survey of Richard Avedon’s influential advertising work Richard Avedon was one of the most sought-after and influential advertising photographers in America from the 1940s to the beginning of the 21st century, creating work that exemplified Madison Avenue at the height of its influence in world culture. Working with a talented cadre of models, copy writers, and art directors, Avedon made images that enticed consumers to embrace the new, especially in the areas of fashion and beauty, with campaigns for Revlon, Chanel, Calvin Klein, Dior, and Versace, among many others. Avedon Advertising tells this story, reproducing memorable ads that range from the buoyant 1940s and 1950s, when post-war prosperity opened up new experiences to consumers; through the explosive ’60s; and into the era defined by celebrity culture and global brand awareness.

Avedon Advertising: A Photographic History

MARTIN, James

The Richard Avedon Foundation

Avedon, Laura

AVEDON,Richard

Individual Artists

Abrams Books

Most of us have some feeling for fashion and have a vague idea of what’s in and what’s out. Less familiar to most, however, is the way fashion works as a global business. Know-It-All Fashion looks beyond the surface of this billion-dollar industry. Each entry is summarized in under a minute–using nothing more than two pages, 300 words, and one picture. Leading fashion experts provide an engrossing crash course in how the style world works today, alongside an engaging look at the founding fathers (and mothers) of fashion who set it up that way. Every aspect of the modern fashion industry is explored, from haute couture to high street, from catwalk to street style, and from glossy magazine to online blog. Some of the recurring themes behind fashion design are also explored, such as the influence of art, music and sport. Know-It-All Fashion includes everything you need to get style savvy.

Know It All Fashion: The 50 Key Modes, Garments, and Designers, Each Explained in Under a Minute (Know It All, 10)

Wellfleet Press

American Look: Fashion and the Image of Women in 1930's and 1940's New York

From the end of the 1930s through the 1940s, the New York fashion industry came into its own. Sportswear, which had evolved from its sporting origins to include simple casual wear for town and country, travel and leisure, was at the centre of this shift. Sportwear provided busy career women, college girls and housewives with clothes that could be worn on all occasions.Drawing on a wonderful array of sources, from fashion magazines to department store records, this book is the rich and absorbing narrative and analysis of how New York sportswear evolved to become the definitive American style and how a modern fashion aesthetic was born. The story that unfolds reveals, with the aid of some wonderful illustrations, how New York's emergent style became dynamic and modern, like the city itself, expressive of the American ideal of athletic, long-limbed women; and how it tapped into both metropolitan Americanness and the America of wide-open spaces.It explores the designers, such as Claire McCardell, Clare Potter and Tina Leser, themselves embodiments of the modern, active woman, and how they gave middle class American women New York sportswear as an alternative to Parisian-inspired designs. It looks for the first time at how its style connected not just to ideals of patriotism and democracy, but to current notions of cleanliness and hygiene, and for example, to 1930s theories of body image, and contemporary dance.

I.B.Tauris

This text argues that fashion and the imagery surrounding it give us a vision of Western culture that is both enticing and alienating, flaunting capitalism's euphoric emblems of glamour and success but also representing the underside of modern life. In the 1970s, photographers like Guy Bourdin and Helmut Newton set models against backdrops of tarnished glamour; in the 1990s Alexander McQueen and John Galliano created decadent femmes fatales whose sexual allure was equally tempting and threatening. Rebecca Arnold exlores the complex nature of modern fashion, attempting to unravel the contradictory emotions of desire and anxiety that it provokes.

Fashion, Desire and Anxiety : Image and Morality in the Twentieth Century

Decorative Arts & Design

From the end of the 1930s through the 1940s, the New York fashion industry came into its own. Sportswear, which had evolved from its sporting origins to include simple casual wear for town and country, travel and leisure, was at the centre of this shift. Sportswear provided busy career women, college girls and housewives with clothes that could be worn on all occasions.Drawing on a wonderful array of sources, from fashion magazines to department store records, this book is the rich and absorbing narrative and analysis of how New York sportswear evolved to become the definitive American style and how a modern fashion aesthetic was born. The story that unfolds reveals, with the aid of some wonderful illustrations, how New York's emergent style became dynamic and modern, like the city itself, expressive of the American ideal of athletic, long-limbed women; and how it tapped into both metropolitan Americanness and the America of wide-open spaces.It explores the designers, such as Claire McCardell, Clare Potter and Tina Leser, themselves embodiments of the modern, active woman, and how they gave middle class American women New York sportswear as an alternative to Parisian-inspired designs. It looks for the first time at how its style connected not just to ideals of patriotism and democracy, but to current notions of cleanliness and hygiene, and for example, to 1930s theories of body image, and contemporary dance.

3 minutes pour comprendre les 50 plus grands courants de la mode

Fashion

COURRIER LIVRE

Less than a year after opening its magnificent permanent galleries in Nice, the Musée National du Sport is presenting an ambitious temporary exhibition on the somewhat unusual theme of sport and fashion—two worlds that are seemingly very different from each other. The exhibition takes visitors on an exciting journey of discovery that attests to the veritable love affair between sport and fashion that began at the end of the nineteenth century with the emergence of elegant sports, and continued decades later when the sports style left the stadium and became part of everyday wear. This trend is now intensified by fruitful collaboration between the two worlds—a social phenomenon that is both popular and elitist, and an economic phenomenon that fosters technological innovations and commercial developments.

En Mode Sport

Boli, Claude

Bramel, Sophie

Bruun, Mette

Chaboud, Nadine

Somogy Editions D'Art

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