Fashion: Visual & Material Interconnections – serie

Winner of the Association of Dress Historians Book of the Year Award, 2022Traditionally associated with rural ways of life in England, often hand-crafted and held up as one of the only items of English folk dress to survive into the 20th century, the smock frock is an object of curiosity in many museum collections. Drawing on a wide variety of sources from surviving garments to newspapers and photographs, this book reveals the hidden history of the smock frock to present new social histories.Discussing the smock frock in its widest contexts, Alison Toplis explores how garments were handmade and manufactured by the ready-made clothing industry, and bought by men of different trades. She traces the smock frock’s usage across England as well as in export markets such as Australia. Following the garment’s decline in the late 19th century, the book investigates how this essentially utilitarian style of workwear came to be held up as an example of disappearing ‘peasant’ craft in an emotional response to urbanisation, and how it was preserved by collectors under the influence of the Arts and Crafts movement.Around the turn of the 20th century, the smock frock was reinvented as both women’s and children’s wear and is now regularly revived in fashion collections by the likes of Molly Goddard. Drawing together extensive visual and material cultures, Alison Toplis unravels a new history of the smock frock.

In the first critical history of French ready-made fashion, Alexis Romano examines an array of cultural sources, including surviving garments, fashion magazines, film, photography and interviews, to weave together previously disparate historical narratives. The resulting volume – Prêt-à-Porter: Paris and Women – situates the ready-made in wider cultural discourses of art, design, urbanism, technology and international policy.Through a close study of fashion magazines, including Vogue and Elle, Romano reveals how the French ready-made and the genre of fashion photography in France developed in tandem. Analyses of representations of space, women and prêt-à-porter in such magazines – alongside other cultural ephemera such as contemporary film, documentary photography and family photographs – demonstrate that popular conceptions of fashion and modernity shifted in the period 1945-68.By connecting national and personal histories, Prêt-à-Porter: Paris and Women reveals the importance of the ready-made to broader narratives of postwar reconstruction, national identity, gender and international dialogue.

During the interwar years, a proliferation of violence encroached upon the glossy, idealistic world of fashion: from the curiously common appearance of dismembered heads in fashion illustration, to seemingly torturous techniques and devices advertised by beauty imagery, even extending to garments designed to look assaulted and destroyed. Danger in the Path of Chic brings this disturbing imagery to light for the first time, proposing new directions for historians of fashion, violence and culture in the interwar years.Concentrating on London, Paris and New York as fashion centres and political allies, the volume explores why horror manifested itself in this way, at this time, and in a sphere that is usually perceived as being built on fantasy and escape. In doing so, Danger in the Path of Chic situates fashion within the very real social, psychological, economic and political traumas of the period.

Winner of the Association of Dress Historians Book of the Year Award, 2022Traditionally associated with rural ways of life in England, often hand-crafted and held up as one of the only items of English folk dress to survive into the 20th century, the smock frock is an object of curiosity in many museum collections. Drawing on a wide variety of sources from surviving garments to newspapers and photographs, this book reveals the hidden history of the smock frock to present new social histories.Discussing the smock frock in its widest contexts, Alison Toplis explores how garments were handmade and manufactured by the ready-made clothing industry, and bought by men of different trades. She traces the smock frock’s usage across England as well as in export markets such as Australia. Following the garment’s decline in the late 19th century, the book investigates how this essentially utilitarian style of workwear came to be held up as an example of disappearing ‘peasant’ craft in an emotional response to urbanisation, and how it was preserved by collectors under the influence of the Arts and Crafts movement.Around the turn of the 20th century, the smock frock was reinvented as both women’s and children’s wear and is now regularly revived in fashion collections by the likes of Molly Goddard. Drawing together extensive visual and material cultures, Alison Toplis unravels a new history of the smock frock.

In the first critical history of French ready-made fashion, Alexis Romano examines an array of cultural sources, including surviving garments, fashion magazines, film, photography and interviews, to weave together previously disparate historical narratives. The resulting volume – Prêt-à-Porter: Paris and Women – situates the ready-made in wider cultural discourses of art, design, urbanism, technology and international policy.Through a close study of fashion magazines, including Vogue and Elle, Romano reveals how the French ready-made and the genre of fashion photography in France developed in tandem. Analyses of representations of space, women and prêt-à-porter in such magazines – alongside other cultural ephemera such as contemporary film, documentary photography and family photographs – demonstrate that popular conceptions of fashion and modernity shifted in the period 1945-68.By connecting national and personal histories, Prêt-à-Porter: Paris and Women reveals the importance of the ready-made to broader narratives of postwar reconstruction, national identity, gender and international dialogue.

During the interwar years, a proliferation of violence encroached upon the glossy, idealistic world of fashion: from the curiously common appearance of dismembered heads in fashion illustration, to seemingly torturous techniques and devices advertised by beauty imagery, even extending to garments designed to look assaulted and destroyed. Danger in the Path of Chic brings this disturbing imagery to light for the first time, proposing new directions for historians of fashion, violence and culture in the interwar years.Concentrating on London, Paris and New York as fashion centres and political allies, the volume explores why horror manifested itself in this way, at this time, and in a sphere that is usually perceived as being built on fantasy and escape. In doing so, Danger in the Path of Chic situates fashion within the very real social, psychological, economic and political traumas of the period.

Revisiting Dana Bertran Merrill’s remarkable archive, this innovative interrogation of photographs of the anonymous workforce who built the Madeira-Mamoré railroad reveals how fashion inhabited a landscape defined by extractive capitalism, transnational migration, and uneven networks of power. Bringing fashion studies into conversation with photography and the histories of labor and colonialism, it foregrounds the presence of migrant labourers from across the globe, Caribbean washerwomen, North American contractors, Brazilian engineers and sanitarians, and Indigenous communities. The result is a vivid account of how the camera both reinforced and unsettled racialised systems of classification and control.Fashion at the Frontier offers fresh perspectives on fashion, time and archival silence, opening up new ways of understanding dress within the wider histories of Latin America and global modernity.

Exploring the proliferation of makeup as both practice and metaphor across intellectual, visual and material culture, this transnational study involves analysis of French, British, German and Russian art, philosophy, fiction, journalism and advice manuals.From its negative early modern associations with the sensual and the superficial to its acceptance and widespread use in the 1910s, Ksenia Gusarova traces makeup’s many transformations.Across centuries and national boundaries, associations between makeup and visual arts, particularly painting, were fairly commonplace in European intellectual and popular culture. Though mostly unflattering, occasionally comparisons were made that challenged established aesthetic hierarchies in order to promote new definitions of art. The Art of Beauty examines the discourse about cosmetics as (inferior) art, arguing for its important role in policing the boundaries of what was considered artistic practice and who was allowed to engage in it, with regard to gender in particular, but also class and race.

This innovative study offers the first full-length account of George Washington as a figure shaped through dress, appearance, and the material politics of the 18th-century Atlantic world.Drawing on extensive archival, visual and material evidence—ledgers, tailors’ invoices, military orders, correspondence, and plantation records as well as portraits and surviving items of dress—Ballard demonstrates how clothing structured Washington’s self-presentation as planter, soldier, and emerging national leader.Foregrounding the labor and expertise of enslaved and indentured valets, spinners, weavers, hairdressers, and artisans, the book reveals how Washington’s sartorial life depended on systems of coercion and global trade. Ballard combines interdisciplinary methods from material culture studies, art history, Black studies, and fashion theory to reconstruct how Washington used clothing to navigate rank, authority, racial hierarchy, diplomacy, and reputation.George Washington, Slavery, and the New Politics of Style, 1743-1789 reframes foundational narratives by treating dress as a form of political thought, one which shaped militia uniforms, the visual identity of the Continental Army, and the symbolic language of the early republic. Richly documented and conceptually ambitious, the book invites scholars to reconsider the cultural formation of the United States through the textiles, bodies, and labor that made Washington visible and offers invaluable context and insights for students in fashion, American history and culture, and beyond.

This innovative study offers the first full-length account of George Washington as a figure shaped through dress, appearance, and the material politics of the 18th-century Atlantic world.Drawing on extensive archival, visual and material evidence—ledgers, tailors’ invoices, military orders, correspondence, and plantation records as well as portraits and surviving items of dress—Ballard demonstrates how clothing structured Washington’s self-presentation as planter, soldier, and emerging national leader.Foregrounding the labor and expertise of enslaved and indentured valets, spinners, weavers, hairdressers, and artisans, the book reveals how Washington’s sartorial life depended on systems of coercion and global trade. Ballard combines interdisciplinary methods from material culture studies, art history, Black studies, and fashion theory to reconstruct how Washington used clothing to navigate rank, authority, racial hierarchy, diplomacy, and reputation.George Washington, Slavery, and the New Politics of Style, 1743-1789 reframes foundational narratives by treating dress as a form of political thought, one which shaped militia uniforms, the visual identity of the Continental Army, and the symbolic language of the early republic. Richly documented and conceptually ambitious, the book invites scholars to reconsider the cultural formation of the United States through the textiles, bodies, and labor that made Washington visible and offers invaluable context and insights for students in fashion, American history and culture, and beyond.

Between 1974 and 1989, significant changes were taking place in the lives of Singaporean women and in their local fashion industry. These shifts were not only reflected in but actively shaped by the magazine Her World.In Her World, Women and Fashion in Singapore, Nadya Wang uses dress as a lens through which to view fragments of the magazine over 15 years. Advocating for a new and decentred understanding of the evolution of the Singapore woman, Wang’s writing also traces the creation of a fashion industry that pivoted from seeking validation from global fashion cities to establishing itself as the lead of a Southeast Asian fashion community.Visual analysis of archival materials is combined with oral history interviews to demonstrate how the women of Singapore engaged with local and global ideas, fashion and beauty commodities, and imagery of models and beauty queens in their self-fashioning. Challenging existing understandings of their agency, this book attests to the creativity and adaptability of Singapore women and Singapore fashion designers.