Representations of Fashion: The Metropolis and Mediological Reflection between the Nineteenth and the Twentieth Centuries (Bi Sheng/Juan Pablos Digitovisuo Artifacts Series)

Advance word on REPRESENTATIONS OF FASHION

The rest of us interpreters of culture might as well lay pens to rest. Antonio Rafele's rapid injection in the arm spirals us down through rabbit holes where we glimpse with penetrating insight projections of our urban-made psychic selves. As if lucid dreaming, we come to understand how authors such as Poe, Leopardi, and García Márquez offer pit-stops in our otherwise impossibly fast-forward moving, Ritalin-induced life filled to the brim with TV, internet, and videogames. We can reach through this illusion, but choose instead to buy into the discontinuities of fashion that never quite satiate our existential emptiness. Not since Baudrillard, Barthes, McLuhan, and the Wachowski Bros has such a mind come along who can zip open reality to show with such precision the specular and spectacular nature of our existence...Dare if you will to step into this daydream.

FREDERICK LUIS ALDAMA | Arts & Humanities Distinguished Professor at The Ohio State University

"In this provocative and pathbreaking book, Rafele shows us how a mediological approach can radically and productively reframe our understanding of modernist subjectivity. His lyrical meditations on the works of Simmel and Benjamin reveal the extent to which 20th century notions of subjectivity must be understood in relation to 19nth-century concepts of the metropolis and the technology of photography. If you've ever wondered what the 'New' in New Media Studies might actually look like, you'll find a compelling example in this brilliantly-conceived and well-executed study."