Fashioning Politics and Protests


Book Description

Through meticulous examinations, this book analyzes how women update their identities and articulate their feelings through clothing and art in protests, politics in the United States in the 20th century. Topics explored include the suffragists and their impact on contemporary art, the significance of the red dress in both The Handmaid’s Tale and the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women movement, the impact of the Miss America protests, the rising popularity of the pantsuit for women, the recent dominance of the pussyhat, and the way that feminist slogans are disseminated on t-shirts. Movements discussed include craftivism, hashtag culture, feminism, the CROWN act, Pantsuit Nation, socially-committed stores, and more. Interdisciplinary and intersectional at its core, addressing numerous areas, including fashion, sociology, visual culture, art history, feminism, and popular culture; Fashioning Politics and Protests uncovers how women continue to use visual means, explored via their clothing, to change the world.




Dressing the Resistance


Book Description

Dressing the Resistance is a celebration of how we use clothing, fashion, and costume to ignite activism and spur social change. Weaving together historical and current protest movements across the globe, Dressing the Resistance explores how everyday people and the societies they live in harness the visual power of dress to fight for radical change. American suffragettes made and wore dresses from old newspapers printed with voting slogans. Male farmers in rural India wore their wives' saris while staging sit-ins on railroad tracks against government neglect. Costume designer and dress historian Camille Benda analyzes cultural movements and the clothes that defined them through nearly 200 archival images, photographs, and paintings that bring each event to life, from ancient Roman rebellions to the #MeToo movement, from twentieth century punk subcultures to Black Lives Matter marches.







Dressing for the Culture Wars


Book Description

Style of dress has always been a way for Americans to signify their politics, but perhaps never so overtly as in the 1960s and 1970s. Whether participating in presidential campaigns or Vietnam protests, hair and dress provided a powerful cultural tool for social activists to display their politics to the world and became both the cause and a symbol of the rift in American culture. Some Americans saw stylistic freedom as part of their larger political protests, integral to the ideals of self-expression, sexual freedom, and equal rights for women and minorities. Others saw changes in style as the erosion of tradition and a threat to the established social and gender norms at the heart of family and nation. Through the lens of fashion and style, Dressing for the Culture Wars guides us through the competing political and social movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Although long hair on men, pants and miniskirts on women, and other hippie styles of self-fashioning could indeed be controversial, Betty Luther Hillman illustrates how self-presentation influenced the culture and politics of the era and carried connotations similarly linked to the broader political challenges of the time. Luther Hillman’s new line of inquiry demonstrates how fashion was both a reaction to and was influenced by the political climate and its implications for changing norms of gender, race, and sexuality.




Fashioning Identity


Book Description

We dress to communicate who we are, or who we would like others to think we are, telling seductive fashion narratives through our adornment. Yet, today, fashion has been democratized through high-low collaborations, social media and real-time fashion mediation, complicating the basic dynamic of identity displays, and creating tension between personal statements and social performances. Fashioning Identity explores how this tension is performed through fashion production and consumption,by examining a diverse series of case studies - from ninety-year old fashion icons to the paradoxical rebellion in 'normcore', and from soccer jerseys in Kenya to heavy metal band T-shirts in Europe. Through these cases, the role of time, gender, age memory, novelty, copying, the body and resistance are considered within the context of the contemporary fashion scene. Offering a fresh approach to the subject by readdressing Fred Davis' seminal concept of 'identity ambivalence' in Fashion, Culture and Identity (1992), Mackinney-Valentin argues that we are in an epoch of 'status ambivalence', in which fashioning one's own identity has become increasingly complicated.




Dress and Ideology


Book Description

Dress and fashion are powerful visual means of communicating ideology, whether political, social or religious. From the communist values of equality, simplicity and solidarity exemplified in the Mao suit to the myriad of fashion protests of feminists such as French revolutionary women's demand to wear trousers, dress can symbolize ideological orthodoxy as well as revolt. With contributions from a wide range of international scholars, this book presents the first scholarly analysis of dress and ideology through accessible case studies. Chapters are organized thematically and explore dress in relation to topics including nation, identity, religion, politics and utopias, across an impressive chronological reach from antiquity to the present day. Dress & Ideology will appeal to students and scholars of fashion, history, sociology, cultural studies, politics and gender studies.




Portrait of a Woman in Silk


Book Description

Through the story of a portrait of a woman in a silk dress, historian Zara Anishanslin embarks on a fascinating journey, exploring and refining debates about the cultural history of the eighteenth-century British Atlantic world. While most scholarship on commodities focuses either on labor and production or on consumption and use, Anishanslin unifies both, examining the worlds of four identifiable people who produced, wore, and represented this object: a London weaver, one of early modern Britain’s few women silk designers, a Philadelphia merchant’s wife, and a New England painter. Blending macro and micro history with nuanced gender analysis, Anishanslin shows how making, buying, and using goods in the British Atlantic created an object-based community that tied its inhabitants together, while also allowing for different views of the Empire. Investigating a range of subjects including self-fashioning, identity, natural history, politics, and trade, Anishanslin makes major contributions both to the study of material culture and to our ongoing conversation about how to write history.




The Routledge Handbook of Language and Mind Engineering


Book Description

The Routledge Handbook of Language and Mind Engineering is a comprehensive work that delves into the complex interplay between language, culture, politics, and media in shaping the human mind. The book is divided into five main sections, each exploring different aspects of mind engineering: I. Political Mind Engineering; II. Commercial Mind Engineering; III. Media, Culture, and Mind Engineering; IV. Linguistic and Semiotic Analysis of Mind Engineering; V. Mind Engineering in Educational Settings. The book provides a multi-dimensional perspective on how language, media, culture, and politics intersect to shape individuals' thoughts and beliefs. It highlights the diverse methods and contexts in which mind engineering occurs, making it a valuable resource for scholars, researchers, and policymakers interested in understanding the complexities of contemporary discourse and manipulation of human thought. The contents of this cutting-edge handbook will engage all undergraduate, postgraduate, PhD students and scholars, and researchers at all levels, in fields such as languages, linguistics, politics, communication studies, media studies, and psychology. Chapter 15 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) International license. Chapter 17 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution‐Non Commercial‐No Derivatives (CC‐BY‐NC‐ND) 4.0 license. Chapter 18 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.




Political Aesthetics of Global Protest


Book Description

From Egypt to India, and from Botswana to London, worker, youth and middle class rebellions have taken on the political and bureaucratic status quo. When most people can no longer earn a decent wage, they pit themselves against the privilege of small, wealthy and often corrupt elites. A remarkable feature of the protests from the Arab Spring onwards has been the salience of images, songs, videos, humour, satire and dramatic performances. This collection explores the central role the aesthetic played in energising the massive mobilisations of young people, the disaffected, the middle classes and the apolitical silent majority. Discover how it fuelled solidarities and alliances among democrats, workers, trade unions, civil rights activists and opposition parties.




Fashioning Italian youth


Book Description

Fashioning Italian youth examines popular media representations of Italian young people’s style trends and bodily practices from 1958–75. By looking at visual and written representations of transnational youth trends – like urlatori, amici, beats and hippies – in Italian teen magazines, Musicarelli films and youth-oriented television programmes, it investigates changes in the social construction of Italian young people’s political, generational, national, ethnic and gender identities. The monograph connects the emergence of youth-oriented transnational trends to the national and global history of young people, and explores the dynamics that contributed to the construction of a specifically Italian youth culture in this period.