Georgina Ripley – författare

Scottish-born stylist Ray Petri (1948–1989), founder of the maverick Buffalo collective, defined the look and feel of radical 1980s magazines such as The Face, i-D, and Arena. Harnessing the power of street style, sportswear, and club culture, Petri’s vision took the sartorial vocabulary of subcultural styles into the mainstream. His radical casting of Black models and his genderplay marked a culturally reflexive, political approach to the relationship between fashion and identity. Challenging the policing of masculinity and sexuality in particular, Petri’s imagery boldly toyed with the iconography of homoeroticism against the backdrop of gay rights activism and the AIDS crisis. Today, the Buffalo spirit endures in the countercultural references, cultural diversity, and post-gender conversation that underlies the most powerful of contemporary fashion imagery. This book traces how Petri and Buffalo created the template for modern fashion photography by advocating for a new cultural order.

Scottish-born stylist Ray Petri (1948–1989), founder of the maverick Buffalo collective, defined the look and feel of radical 1980s magazines such as The Face, i-D, and Arena. Harnessing the power of street style, sportswear, and club culture, Petri’s vision took the sartorial vocabulary of subcultural styles into the mainstream. His radical casting of Black models and his genderplay marked a culturally reflexive, political approach to the relationship between fashion and identity. Challenging the policing of masculinity and sexuality in particular, Petri’s imagery boldly toyed with the iconography of homoeroticism against the backdrop of gay rights activism and the AIDS crisis. Today, the Buffalo spirit endures in the countercultural references, cultural diversity, and post-gender conversation that underlies the most powerful of contemporary fashion imagery. This book traces how Petri and Buffalo created the template for modern fashion photography by advocating for a new cultural order.

At its inception, the ‘Little Black Dress’ was radically modern: a masculine-inspired, anti-traditionalist female attire. Yet it has remained a wardrobe staple for almost a century, each new silhouette redressing gendered boundaries of fashion to reflect evolving ideals of beauty and sexuality. In attempting to reconcile the historical study of fashion in the West with the reality of a global fashion system of production, distribution and consumption, and the urgent demand for the industry to be more aware of its footfalls in our culture, Little Black Dress: A Radical Fashion widens the lens through which we interpret the colour black.In this book, international scholars, curators and fashion writers explore how black’s paradoxical meanings have made the LBD simultaneously expressive of respect and rebellion, sophistication and dissident sexualities, piety and perversion. Bridging tradition and innovation, fashion and anti-fashion, the LBD emerges as a radical fashion for the 21st century.

Scottish-born stylist Ray Petri (1948 1989), founder of the maverick Buffalo collective, defined the look and feel of radical 1980s magazines such as The Face, i-D, and Arena. Harnessing the power of street style, sportswear, and club culture, Petri s vision took the sartorial vocabulary of subcultural styles into the mainstream. His radical casting of Black models and his genderplay marked a culturally reflexive, political approach to the relationship between fashion and identity. Challenging the policing of masculinity and sexuality in particular, Petri s imagery boldly toyed with the iconography of homoeroticism against the backdrop of gay rights activism and the AIDS crisis. Today, the Buffalo spirit endures in the countercultural references, cultural diversity, and post-gender conversation that underlies the most powerful of contemporary fashion imagery. This book traces how Petri and Buffalo created the template for modern fashion photography by advocating for a new cultural order.