Dress Cultures – serie

In the first comprehensive study of the interactions between fashion, performance and performativity, a group of international experts explore fashion as the ideal ‘complex space’ – or, in other words, the ideal space where performance and performativity come together, according to the works of seminal theorists Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Andrew Parker.Bringing together western and non-western, historical and contemporary case studies and theories, the book explores the magazines, photography, exhibitions, global colonial divides, digital media, and more, which have become key markers of the fashion industry as we know it today.Using existing literature as a springboard and incorporating perspectives from fashion studies, art history, media studies and gender studies, as well as from artists and practitioners, Fashion, Performance, and Performativity is an innovative and essential work for students, scholars and practitioners across multiple disciplines.

In 2005, British supermodel Kate Moss went to Glastonbury with her then-boyfriend, indie rocker Pete Doherty. Their unwashed appearance captured widespread attention, propelling the British indie music scene and its signature look—slender bodies clad in skinny jeans—to the center of popular fashion.Using this fashionable watershed as a launching point, Fashioning Indie narrates indie’s evolution: from a 1980s British music subculture into a 21st-century international fashion phenomenon. It explores the lucrative transformation of indie style, first into high concept menswear and later into “festival fashion”—a womenswear phenomenon that remade what indie looked like and provided a launching point to reimagine who the ideal subject of indie could be.Fashioning Indie is essential reading for academic and popular audiences, offering an original account of what happens when a subculture is incorporated into the commercial fashion system. As the music and fashions of festivals face increasing scrutiny in debates about diversity and inclusion, and the transformations of indie style coincide with the global expansion of the second-hand retail sector, the book offers also essential insights into the broader culture of popular fashion in the 21st century and the values that inform it.

In the first book to address the critical role of the (un)dressed body in the formation of the modern Middle East, these essays unveil contemporary struggles over nation, gender, modernity and post-modernity. Contributions from leading interdisciplinary scholars, exploring gender representation, photography, dress and visual culture, recount the role of the visible elite body in campaigns for gender and social emancipation, dress histories concerning early nationalist women and men, and legal frameworks used by those who seek to control the movement of gendered bodies. The result is a rich picture of a historical period and cultural landscape which brings dress and visual culture back into historical narratives of the modern Middle East.Recognising multiple modernities, multiple imperialisms and diverse regional experiences of post-colonialism, Fashioning the Modern Middle East contains a range of theoretical frameworks invaluable to students of fashion studies, Middle Eastern studies, anthropology, photography and gender. Bringing forward new primary material and re-investigating extant sources from new perspectives, this is the essential introduction to the role of the dressed and undressed body in the formation of the modern Middle East.

The transformation of China from a major site for clothing manufacture to an intensely fashion consuming society has been widely documented. Less has been written about the making of Chinese fashion. In Fashion in Multiple Chinas, expert authors explore how a multitude of Chinese fashions operate across the widespread, fragmented and diffused Chinese diaspora. They challenge the idea of Chinese nationalism as 'one nation', as well as of China as a single reality, revealing the realities of Chinese fashion as diverse and comprising multiple practices. They also demonstrate how the making of Chinese fashion is composed of numerous layers, often involving a web of global entanglements between manufacturing and circulation, retailing and branding. Chapters cover the mechanics of the PRC fashion industry, the creative economy of Chinese fashion, its retail and branding, and the cultural identity of Chinese fashion from the diasporas comprising the transglobal landscape of fashion production.

For South Asia, fashion and consumption have come to play an increasingly important role in the lives of young people and in the formation of youth cultures. Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka have all, in related and distinctive ways, been producing confident young fashion consumers, who are proving to be an important market for fashion.This book explores South Asian youth cultures and fashion across the countries of this region and their diasporas from a transnational perspective. Through visual and textual analysis of film, photography and digital cultures, as well as ethnographic fieldwork, the expert contributors look at how gender, sexuality, class, the media and faith intersect with and style youth cultures. By establishing the heterogeneous nature of South Asia and its youth cultures, they also dismantle grand western narratives that tend to understand the region's diverse cultural modernity through the lens of homogeneity.

Shortlisted for the Association of Dress Historians Book of the Year Award, 2024In 2022, it was reported that plus-sizes accounted for nearly twenty percent of all women’s apparel sales in the United States and was one of the industry’s few growth sectors. For many, this news seemed to herald a remarkably inclusive turn for an industry that long bartered in exclusivity. Yet the recent success of plus-size fashion obscures a rather complicated history–one that can be traced back over a century, and which illuminates the fraught relationship between fashion, fat, and weight bias in American culture.Although many regard fat as a malady of the present, in the early twentieth century it was estimated that more than one-third of American women classified as “overweight.” While modern weight bias had yet to fully cement itself in the American imaginary, the limitations of mass garment manufacturing coupled with the ascendent slender beauty ideal had already relegated larger women to fashion’s peripheries. By 1915, however, fashion forecasters predicted that so-called “stoutwear” was well positioned to become one of the most lucrative subsectors of the burgeoning ready-to-wear trade. In the years that followed, stoutwear manufacturers set out to create more space for the fat woman in fashion but, in doing so, revealed an ancillary motivation: that of how to design fat out of existence altogether.Fashion Before Plus-Size considers what came “before” plus-size fashion while also shedding new light on the ways that the fashion industry not only perpetuates but produces weight bias. By situating stoutwear at the confluence of mass manufacturing, beauty ideals, standardized sizing, health discourse, and consumer culture, this book exposes the flawed foundations upon which the contemporary plus-size fashion industry has been built.

Veiling in Fashion enters the worlds of women who wear the hijab, both as an aspect of their religious observance and community belonging, and as a fashion statement, drawing upon global Islamic fashion history. The book uses rich ethnographic investigation of everyday veiling practices among Muslim women in the city of Helsinki as a lens through which to reflect on and advance understanding of matters concerning Muslim dress in international Muslim minority contexts.The book provides an innovative approach to studying veiling by connecting varied realms of practice, demonstrating how domains as apparently separate as fashion, materiality, city spaces, private life, religious beliefs, and cosmopolitan social conditions are all tightly bound up together in ways that only a sensitive multi-disciplinary approach can reveal. It will appeal to scholars and students in fashion, gender, religion, material cultures, and the construction of space.

The Lebanese photographer Marie al-Khazen seized every opportunity to use her camera during the years that she was active between 1920 and 1940. She not only documented her travels around tourist sites in Lebanon but also sought creative experimentation with her camera by staging scenes, manipulating shadows, and superimposing negatives to produce different effects in her prints. Within her photographs, bedouins and European friends, peasants and landlords, men and women comfortably share the same space. Her photographs include an intriguing collection portraying her family and friends living their everyday lives in 1920s and ‘30s Zgharta, a village in the north of Lebanon.Yasmine Nachabe Taan explores these photographs, emphasizing the ways in which notions of gender and class are inscribed within them and revealing how they are charged with symbols of women’s emancipation to today's viewers, through women’s presence as individuals, separate from family restrictions of that time. Images in which women are depicted smoking cigarettes, driving cars, riding horses, and accompanying men on hunting trips counteract the common ways in which women were portrayed in contemporary Lebanon.

Fashion in Altermodern China examines key features of women’s fashion within the cultural and political context of contemporary China. While global brands and styles heavily influence Chinese consumer trends, the Chinese fashion ‘system’ is formed of its own internal logics and emergent trends, too. Adopting the theoretical term ‘altermodern’, Feng Jie encourages us to view China in terms of its rapid modernization which presents its own rhythms and meanings, and argues persuasively that Chinese fashion can’t be wholly understood in terms of a Western discourse of modernity, postmodernity and the global.Expanding our understanding of the fashion ‘system’, Fashion in Altermodern China takes on board new trends in global trade, new technologies, and the hybridity of designs and consumption of fashion. Through critical readings of Barthes, on the ‘neutral’, and Jullien, on ‘blandness’, both directly influenced by Asian philosophies, the author offers a new perspective on Chinese fashion, arguing that, while global-local contexts lead to identifiably postmodern and hybrid aesthetics, for women in contemporary China the flux and mix of available fashions is experienced in a more open neutral manner than scholars have previously described. Crucially, then, rather than position trends in China only in terms of ‘hybridity’ (which betrays a Western bias and a binary logic of host-recipient), there are more fluid ways in which we need to understand how women engage in fashion in China today.

Bringing niqab wearers’ voices to the fore, discussing their narratives on religious agency, identity, social interaction, community, and urban spaces, Anna Piela situates women’s accounts firmly within UK and US socio-political contexts as well as within media discourses on Islam. The niqab has recently emerged as one of the most ubiquitous symbols of everything that is perceived to be wrong with Islam: barbarity, backwardness, exploitation of women, and political radicalization. Yet all these notions are assigned to women who wear the niqab without their consultation; “niqab debates” are held without their voices being heard, and, when they do speak, their views are dismissed.However, the picture painted by the stories told here demonstrates that, for these women, religious symbols such as the niqab are deeply personal, freely chosen, multilayered, and socially situated. Wearing the Niqab gives voice to these women and their stories, and sets the record straight, enhancing understanding of the complex picture around niqab and religious identity and agency.

Associations between the cheongsam dress and Chinese cultural identity are well known but what are the meanings of the cheongsam for members of the Chinese diaspora? In a study grounded in first-hand accounts of wearing, Cheryl Sim explores the practices and experiences of women in Canada, a major Chinese diaspora, and carries out the first in-depth study of the cheongsam from this critical point of view.Questions explored over the course of 20 interviews, as well as during personal reflections on the author's own experiences of wearing, include: is there a desire to re-claim or appropriate the cheongsam? Does this desire risk perpetuating stereotypes of Asian women? Does it undermine one’s identification with one's host country? Can erased heritage(s) be accessed through dress? And how does wearing the cheongsam interact with the male gaze? Revealing feelings of repulsion and attraction, Sim combines personal stories with an authoritative use of theoretical frameworks such as feminism, post-colonialism and autoethnography.Covering issues such as heritage, ethnic identity, authenticity, nationalism, patriarchy and assimilation, Sim demonstrates that the meanings of the cheongsam are multifarious. Readable but with strong academic underpinnings, this book is the entry point into discussions of Chinese dress and diaspora.

In 2005, British supermodel Kate Moss went to Glastonbury with her then-boyfriend, indie rocker Pete Doherty. Their unwashed appearance captured widespread attention, propelling the British indie music scene and its signature look—slender bodies clad in skinny jeans—to the center of popular fashion.Using this fashionable watershed as a launching point, Fashioning Indie narrates indie’s evolution: from a 1980s British music subculture into a 21st-century international fashion phenomenon. It explores the lucrative transformation of indie style, first into high concept menswear and later into “festival fashion”—a womenswear phenomenon that remade what indie looked like and provided a launching point to reimagine who the ideal subject of indie could be.Fashioning Indie is essential reading for academic and popular audiences, offering an original account of what happens when a subculture is incorporated into the commercial fashion system. As the music and fashions of festivals face increasing scrutiny in debates about diversity and inclusion, and the transformations of indie style coincide with the global expansion of the second-hand retail sector, the book offers also essential insights into the broader culture of popular fashion in the 21st century and the values that inform it.

In 1975 Laura Mulvey published her seminal essay on the male gaze, ushering in a new era in understanding the politics and theory of looking at the female body. Since then, feminist thinking has expanded upon and revised Mulvey’s theory and much of the Western world has seen a resurgence in feminist activism as well as the rise of neoliberalism and shifts in digital culture and (self-)representation. For the first time, this book addresses what it means to look at the fashioned female body in this radical new landscape.In chapters exploring the fashioned body within contexts such as queerness, veiling, blackness, pregnancy, fatness, and criminality, Revisiting the Gaze addresses intersectional debates in feminism and re-evaluates the concept of the gaze in light of recent social and political changes. With an interdisciplinary approach, bridging fashion and fine art, this book opens the door to discussions about the male gaze and the fashioned body.

Shortlisted for the Leslie and Sophie Caplan Award for Jewish Non-FictionSurviving photographs of Jewish Viennese men during the fin-de-siècle and interwar periods – both the renowned cultural luminaries and their many anonymous coreligionists – all share a striking sartorial detail: the tailored suit. Yet, until now, the adoption of the tailored suit and its function in the formation of modern Jewish identities remains under-researched.Jews in Suits uses a rich range of written and visual sources, including literary fiction and satire, ‘ego-documents’, photography, trade catalogues, invoices, and department store culture, to propose a new narrative of men, fashion, and their Jewish identities. It reveals that dressing in a modern manner was not simply a matter of assimilation, but rather a way of developing new models of Jewish subjectivity beyond the externally prescribed notion of ‘the Jew’. Drawing upon fashionable dress, folk costume, religious dress, avant-garde, oppositional dress, typologies which are often considered separate from one another, it proposes a new way of reading men and clothing cultures within an iconic cultural milieu, offering insights into the relationship of clothing and grooming to the understanding of the self.

Shortlisted for the Millia Davenport Publication Award.Experimental Fashion traces the proliferation of the grotesque and carnivalesque within contemporary fashion and the close relation between fashion and performance art, from Lady Gaga's raw meat dress to Leigh Bowery's performance style. The book examines the designers and performance artists at the turn of the 21st century whose work challenges established codes of what represents the fashionable body. These innovative people, the book argues, make their challenges through dynamic strategies of parody, humour and inversion. It explores the experimental work of modern designers such as Georgina Godley, Bernhard Willhelm, Rei Kawakubo and fashion designer, performance artist, and club figure Leigh Bowery. It also discusses the increased centrality of experimental fashion through the pop phenomenon, Lady Gaga.

In the first comprehensive study of the interactions between fashion, performance and performativity, a group of international experts explore fashion as the ideal ‘complex space’ – or, in other words, the ideal space where performance and performativity come together, according to the works of seminal theorists Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Andrew Parker.Bringing together western and non-western, historical and contemporary case studies and theories, the book explores the magazines, photography, exhibitions, global colonial divides, digital media, and more, which have become key markers of the fashion industry as we know it today.Using existing literature as a springboard and incorporating perspectives from fashion studies, art history, media studies and gender studies, as well as from artists and practitioners, Fashion, Performance, and Performativity is an innovative and essential work for students, scholars and practitioners across multiple disciplines.

What is the relationship between the soul, or inner life, and what we wear in the making of identity and belief? What bearing do religious and political belonging, respectability, and resistance have on the way in which we dress? Why have more traditional religious practices been so prescriptive about body adornment? Historically, fashionable dress and religion have been positioned as polar opposites. Silhouettes of the Soul brings them together, placing them in conversation with each other. By moving beyond traditional, social scientific, and historical analysis of religious attire and adornment the book presents a variety of disciplinary approaches from across regional, social, and religious locations.Contentious and challenging, as well as academically rigorous, the book's diverse range of contributors - from fashion and religious studies scholars, to designers, activists, monastics, and journalists - explore the relationship between religion and fashion, extending the meanings and possibilities of both dress and spirituality. Combining interviews and personal stories with more traditional theoretical analysis, Silhouettes of the Soul offers new ways of looking at the relationship between religion, personal convictions, and self-expression - our sense of self and our sense of fashion.

Filling a gap in Eastern European fashion studies, this book presents middle-class women consuming fashion in the symbolic ‘Little Paris’ of interwar Bucharest, and examines how their material and cultural means supported the city’s modernisation. Combining archival research with personal archaeology, this interdisciplinary work explores Romania’s reinvention as a modern state, focusing on middle-class women as they lived their lives - walking through the streets, at lavish events, at cafes and clubs, shopping, and working. Analysing largely unseen, unused written and visual texts, The Women of 'Little Paris' encourages exploration of new avenues for research, uniting scholars of Romanian culture, history and fashion and guiding readers through a forgotten, little explored world and, in so doing, adds to our understanding and knowledge of the global image of interwar fashion cultures and the emerging field of Romanian fashion studies.

Filling a gap in Eastern European fashion studies, this book presents middle-class women consuming fashion in the symbolic ‘Little Paris’ of interwar Bucharest, and examines how their material and cultural means supported the city’s modernisation. Combining archival research with personal archaeology, this interdisciplinary work explores Romania’s reinvention as a modern state, focusing on middle-class women as they lived their lives - walking through the streets, at lavish events, at cafes and clubs, shopping, and working. Analysing largely unseen, unused written and visual texts, The Women of 'Little Paris' encourages exploration of new avenues for research, uniting scholars of Romanian culture, history and fashion and guiding readers through a forgotten, little explored world and, in so doing, adds to our understanding and knowledge of the global image of interwar fashion cultures and the emerging field of Romanian fashion studies.

“A revelation. Reclaiming fashion from its European history.” – Shane WhiteWith a focus on sub-Saharan Africa, Fashioning the Afropolis provides a range of innovative perspectives on global fashion, design, dress, photography, and the body in some of the major cities, with a focus on Lagos, Johannesburg, Dakar, and Douala. It contributes to the ongoing debates around the globalization of fashion and fashion theory by exploring fashion as a genuine urban phenomenon on the continent and among its diasporas. To date, “fashion” and “city” have not been systematically related to each other in the African context and, for too long, a western-centric gaze has dominated scholarship, resulting in the perception of Africa as provincial and its visual arts and textile cultures as static and folkloristic. This perspective is all the more distorted, given Africa’s rich sartorial past. With a huge number of tailors ready to adapt and renew clothing, reshaping garments into contemporary styles, and many cities in Africa becoming hot-spots for a steadily growing and well-connected scene of fashion designers in the past 20 years, the time is ripe for a reevaluation and reconsideration of the fashionscapes of Africa. Leading scholars offer an updated empirical and theoretical foundation on which to base new and exciting research on sub-Saharan fashion, challenging perceptions and offering new insights.

A vital update to the definitive guide to fashion and cultural theory, featuring four new chapters and essential revisions throughout in light of key developments in fashion and fashion studies.Across 19 major thinkers from the 19th to the 21st century, the second edition of this comprehensive collection introduces readers to the process of thinking through rich cultural fields such as fashion with the help of social and cultural theory, and thinking through social and cultural theory with the help of fashion. Each chapter guides you through the work of a major thinker and considers their historical context, the role of fashion within their theory, how their theoretical frameworks apply to contemporary fashion studies, and the strengths and limitations of their approach.Featuring new chapters on key theorists Edward Said, bell hooks, Frantz Fanon and W.E.B. Du Bois, this new edition prepares readers to question and diversify the field of fashion. A revised introduction resituates theories in relation to each other and reflects on changing approaches to fashion studies, while revisions to existing chapters equip readers with the most up-to-date critical perspectives and developments in fashion and fashion theory.

A vital update to the definitive guide to fashion and cultural theory, featuring four new chapters and essential revisions throughout in light of key developments in fashion and fashion studies.Across 19 major thinkers from the 19th to the 21st century, the second edition of this comprehensive collection introduces readers to the process of thinking through rich cultural fields such as fashion with the help of social and cultural theory, and thinking through social and cultural theory with the help of fashion. Each chapter guides you through the work of a major thinker and considers their historical context, the role of fashion within their theory, how their theoretical frameworks apply to contemporary fashion studies, and the strengths and limitations of their approach.Featuring new chapters on key theorists Edward Said, bell hooks, Frantz Fanon and W.E.B. Du Bois, this new edition prepares readers to question and diversify the field of fashion. A revised introduction resituates theories in relation to each other and reflects on changing approaches to fashion studies, while revisions to existing chapters equip readers with the most up-to-date critical perspectives and developments in fashion and fashion theory.

Shortlisted for the Association of Dress Historians Book of the Year Award, 2024In 2022, it was reported that plus-sizes accounted for nearly twenty percent of all women’s apparel sales in the United States and was one of the industry’s few growth sectors. For many, this news seemed to herald a remarkably inclusive turn for an industry that long bartered in exclusivity. Yet the recent success of plus-size fashion obscures a rather complicated history–one that can be traced back over a century, and which illuminates the fraught relationship between fashion, fat, and weight bias in American culture.Although many regard fat as a malady of the present, in the early twentieth century it was estimated that more than one-third of American women classified as “overweight.” While modern weight bias had yet to fully cement itself in the American imaginary, the limitations of mass garment manufacturing coupled with the ascendent slender beauty ideal had already relegated larger women to fashion’s peripheries. By 1915, however, fashion forecasters predicted that so-called “stoutwear” was well positioned to become one of the most lucrative subsectors of the burgeoning ready-to-wear trade. In the years that followed, stoutwear manufacturers set out to create more space for the fat woman in fashion but, in doing so, revealed an ancillary motivation: that of how to design fat out of existence altogether.Fashion Before Plus-Size considers what came “before” plus-size fashion while also shedding new light on the ways that the fashion industry not only perpetuates but produces weight bias. By situating stoutwear at the confluence of mass manufacturing, beauty ideals, standardized sizing, health discourse, and consumer culture, this book exposes the flawed foundations upon which the contemporary plus-size fashion industry has been built.

This dynamic exploration of two key modes of visual culture - fashion and photography - in 19th-century Istanbul contributes to an expanding body of research on fashion and the dressed body outside the Euro-American context. Based on meticulous analysis of visual, written and material objects, it focuses on women's lived experience during a time of dramatic change in the Ottoman Empire.Over the 19th century, the women of Istanbul gradually transformed their appearance, adopting European dress and new modes of self-fashioning, including photographs. The book reconstructs a complex fashion history, and the dramatic changes that took place in women’s lives in this period, and given the diverse population of Istanbul in terms of ethnicity, class, race and religion, attends to the differing clothing habits of the women of the city. The book focuses particularly on elite women as fashion tastemakers and on the dress of enslaved and working women.Appealing to scholars across a range of fields, including fashion history, Ottoman studies, women’s and gender history, visual culture and photography history, Fashion in Late Ottoman Istanbul provides a fascinating insight into women's histories, writing and dress practices in a rapidly changing Istanbul.

This dynamic exploration of two key modes of visual culture - fashion and photography - in 19th-century Istanbul contributes to an expanding body of research on fashion and the dressed body outside the Euro-American context. Based on meticulous analysis of visual, written and material objects, it focuses on women's lived experience during a time of dramatic change in the Ottoman Empire.Over the 19th century, the women of Istanbul gradually transformed their appearance, adopting European dress and new modes of self-fashioning, including photographs. The book reconstructs a complex fashion history, and the dramatic changes that took place in women’s lives in this period, and given the diverse population of Istanbul in terms of ethnicity, class, race and religion, attends to the differing clothing habits of the women of the city. The book focuses particularly on elite women as fashion tastemakers and on the dress of enslaved and working women.Appealing to scholars across a range of fields, including fashion history, Ottoman studies, women’s and gender history, visual culture and photography history, Fashion in Late Ottoman Istanbul provides a fascinating insight into women's histories, writing and dress practices in a rapidly changing Istanbul.

In an industry in which appearances, images and looks dominate, have you ever considered what lies beyond the visual? Drawing on the embodied experience of blindness, this book attends to a “feel-able” world, revealing alternative ways of knowing and experiencing fashion and dress through the complexity of non-visual sensory knowledge.Bringing together sensory fashion studies and disability studies, Julie Gork combines in-depth interviews and reflexive autoethnographic practice to challenge and complicate the assumption that participation in the visuality of fashion is either necessary or desirable.Joining people who are blind in their wardrobes and in retail spaces, we learn how the interaction of the senses, materiality and affect unsettles sighted expertise. By revealing the constellation of sensory skills and knowledge used to make sense of and appreciate fashion and dress, this powerful study offers new and transformative ways to experience fashion.

In an industry in which appearances, images and looks dominate, have you ever considered what lies beyond the visual? Drawing on the embodied experience of blindness, this book attends to a “feel-able” world, revealing alternative ways of knowing and experiencing fashion and dress through the complexity of non-visual sensory knowledge.Bringing together sensory fashion studies and disability studies, Julie Gork combines in-depth interviews and reflexive autoethnographic practice to challenge and complicate the assumption that participation in the visuality of fashion is either necessary or desirable.Joining people who are blind in their wardrobes and in retail spaces, we learn how the interaction of the senses, materiality and affect unsettles sighted expertise. By revealing the constellation of sensory skills and knowledge used to make sense of and appreciate fashion and dress, this powerful study offers new and transformative ways to experience fashion.

Increasing numbers of women are engaging in the development and discussion of modest dressing; a movement matched by a growing media and popular demand for intelligent commentary about the topic. Modest Fashion sets out to meet that need.As a trend, modest dressing is spreading across the world, yet it is rarely viewed as 'fashion'. Studying consumers and producers, retailers and bloggers, Modest Fashion provides an up to the minute account of the art of dressing modestly - and fashionably.Leading scholars in the area, along with journalists, fashion designers, entrepreneurs and bloggers discuss the emergence of a niche market for modest fashion among and between Jewish, Christian and Muslim faith groups as well as secular dressers. Crossing creeds and cultures, analysing commentary alongside commerce, the book probes the personal and the political as well as religious, aesthetic and economic implications of contemporary dress practices and the debates that surround them.

A new look for Austerity...The coldest winter on record, rationing, successive economic crises, bombed out towns and cities; with some justification 'Austerity Britain' in the late 1940s is coloured in the popular imagination in tones of drab. Dressing for Austerity shines a light on alternative visions of post-war optimism and aspiration. It traces how, set against the Labour government's philosophy of 'Austerity by design' in a climate of post-war idealism, the desire for affordable fashionable clothing, access to leisure, and the health, time and money to enjoy them became totemic symbols of post-war ambition that impelled new strategies of state control and consumer agency. The book examines the immediate post-war period - its politics, its fashions and its people - in new ways and on its own terms as a critical tipping point in the making of modern Britain.