Foundations of Fashion Studies – serie

When Adorned in Dreams was first published in 1985, Angela Carter described the book as ‘the best I have read on the subject, bar none.’From haute couture to haberdashery, and ‘deviant’ dress to Dior, Elizabeth Wilson traces the social and cultural history of fashion and its complex relationship to modernity. From the ‘dress reform’ movement to certain strands of feminism, Wilson delights in the power of fashion to mark out identity - or subvert it.Explore topics including fashion and city life, feminism and fashion, and oppositional dress in this authoritative scholarly text on fashion’s pivotal role in modern society.

Over the past three centuries, London has established itself as one of the world’s most inventive fashion capitals. Drawing on a range of sources, including paintings, street photography, maps, tourist guides, literature, and stage and press representations, Fashioning London paints a vivid and definitive portrait of London's iconoclastic style.Explore how particular styles of dress became emblematic of this leading international city, ultimately challenging the fashion dominance of Paris, Milan, and New York. Christopher Breward constructs an original history of clothing in London, through its manufacture, promotion, and cultural significance, while examining how issues of space, architecture and performance impinge on notions of fashionability.You will come away from this text understanding that although city life and fashion have always been intertwined, nowhere has this relationship been more excitingly expressed than on the streets of London.

In 747, Saint Boniface declared that wide stripes and scarlet borders in dress were a dangerous incitement of lust and ruination of the soul. A thousand years later the Jesuit Father Bernard Vaughan, in his book The Sins of Society, claimed that immodest dress led to paganism, while the popular v-shaped necklines of fashionable tops (referred to by some doctors as 'pneumonia necklines') were denounced as immoral by religious critics, along with short skirts.For many years dress and morality have been intertwined, while moralists throughout history have raged against fashions for being too short, too long, too tight, too loose, or too costly.In this enlightening and entertaining book, Aileen Ribeiro looks at fashion extremes over the centuries – from codpieces to corsets – revealing how dress has functioned as a vehicle of righteousness or turpitude, and as an expression of sexuality, class or social status.With sharp wit and lavish illustrations, Dress and Morality offers an in-depth exploration of the comical vanities and social etiquettes associated with dress in the past. This foundational fashion classic has been re-issued with a new preface, afterword and further reading list – remaining an essential and entertaining read.