The Aesthetics of Dress


Book Description

This book explores the relationships between how the body appears and feels in everyday life through aesthetics. The recent shift away from Kantian aesthetics towards a more enacted route places at its core the realization that the world is experienced as possibilities for action, and critical to this understanding is how the body’s movement generates multiple pre-linguistic experiences and meaning. This route therefore realizes the importance of the body’s role in working in conjunction with cognition in generating these experiences. Nevertheless, this attention has predominantly focused on how the body ‘feels’ through engagement, rather than how it appears. This might be problematic as it is essential to appreciate that the body is not naked in everyday life, and therefore through dress we look to restore the balance between appearance and feel. We ‘dress’ our bodies to communicate – to express our confidence (or not), identity, status, aspirations, affiliations etc. We dress according to the situation/audience etc. It might be to attract attention, to protect or to hide the body. It might be to accentuate height, or religious belief, or simply to shock or conform. Essentially, it is not simply clothing that we wear that achieves this – for example, hair, makeup, jewellery, handbags, shoes, piercings, tattoos – cumulatively these constitute how we ‘dress’ our bodies. Thus, the appearance (as well as the feel) of the body is significant if we are to appreciate an enacted approach to aesthetics.




The Way we Look 2nd edition


Book Description

This classic text explains and applies the basic elements of design and aesthetics for a variety of apparel professionals. Using her own theory of the Apparel-Body-Construct -- the look or appearance of the body, clothing and accessories as a unit the author defines aesthetics in the context of understanding how we perceive dress and our reactions to it.




Social Psychology of Dress


Book Description

Social Psychology of Dress presents and explains the major theories and concepts that are important to understanding relationships between dress and human behavior. These concepts and theories are derived from such disciplines as sociology, psychology, anthropology, communication, and textiles and clothing. Information presented will provide summaries of empirical research, as well as examples from current events or popular culture. The book provides a broad-based and inclusive discussion of the social psychology of dress, including: - The study of dress and how to do it - Cultural topics such as cultural patterns including technology, cultural complexity, normative order, aesthetics, hygiene, ethnicity, ritual - Societal topics such as family, economy-occupation, social organizations and sports, fraternal organizations - Individual-focused theories on deviance, personality variables, self, values, body image and social cognition - Coverage of key theories related to dress and identity provide a strong theoretical foundation for further research Unique chapter features bring in industry application and current events. The end-of-chapter summaries, discussion questions and activities give students opportunities to study and research dress. Teaching resources including an instructor's guide, test bank and PowerPoint presentations with full-color versions of images from the textbook. Social Psychology of Dress STUDIO - Study smarter with self-quizzes featuring scored results and personalized study tips - Review concepts with flashcards of essential vocabulary - Download worksheets to complete chapter activities




The Age of Undress


Book Description

Exploring the popularity and meaning of neoclassical dress in the 1790s, this book traces its evolution in Europe and relationship to other artistic media.




The First Book of Fashion


Book Description

This captivating book reproduces arguably the most extraordinary primary source documents in fashion history. Providing a revealing window onto the Renaissance, they chronicle how style-conscious accountant Matthäus Schwarz and his son Veit Konrad experienced life through clothes, and climbed the social ladder through fastidious management of self-image. These bourgeois dandies' agenda resonates as powerfully today as it did in the sixteenth century: one has to dress to impress, and dress to impress they did. The Schwarzes recorded their sartorial triumphs as well as failures in life in a series of portraits by illuminists over 60 years, which have been comprehensively reproduced in full color for the first time. These exquisite illustrations are accompanied by the Schwarzes' fashion-focussed yet at times deeply personal captions, which render the pair the world's first fashion bloggers and pioneers of everyday portraiture. The First Book of Fashion demonstrates how dress – seemingly both ephemeral and trivial – is a potent tool in the right hands. Beyond this, it colorfully recaptures the experience of Renaissance life and reveals the importance of clothing to the aesthetics and every day culture of the period. Historians Ulinka Rublack's and Maria Hayward's insightful commentaries create an unparalleled portrait of sixteenth-century dress that is both strikingly modern and thorough in its description of a true Renaissance fashionista's wardrobe. This first English translation also includes a bespoke pattern by TONY award-winning costume designer and dress historian Jenny Tiramani, from which readers can recreate one of Schwarz's most elaborate and politically significant outfits.




The Lost Art of Dress


Book Description

"A tribute to a time when style -- and maybe even life -- felt more straightforward, and however arbitrary, there were definitive answers." -- Sadie Stein, Paris Review As a glance down any street in America quickly reveals, American women have forgotten how to dress. We lack the fashion know-how we need to dress professionally and beautifully. In The Lost Art of Dress, historian and dressmaker Linda Przybyszewski reveals that this wasn't always true. In the first half of the twentieth century, a remarkable group of women -- the so-called Dress Doctors -- taught American women that knowledge, not money, was key to a beautiful wardrobe. They empowered women to design, make, and choose clothing for both the workplace and the home. Armed with the Dress Doctors' simple design principles -- harmony, proportion, balance, rhythm, emphasis -- modern American women from all classes learned to dress for all occasions in ways that made them confident, engaged members of society. A captivating and beautifully illustrated look at the world of the Dress Doctors, The Lost Art of Dress introduces a new audience to their timeless rules of fashion and beauty -- rules which, with a little help, we can certainly learn again.




The Aesthetic Economy of Fashion


Book Description

Fashion is bound up with promoting the 'new', concerned with constantly changing aesthetics. The favoured styles or looks of a season arise out of the work of a vast range of different actors who collectively produce, select, distribute and promote the new ideals, before moving on to next season. How, then, are fashionable commodities stabilized long enough for them to be selected, distributed and sold? Since there are few studies that actually examine the work that goes on inside the world of fashion, we know little about these processes. This book addresses this gap in our knowledge by examining how aesthetic products are defined, distributed and valued. It focuses attention on the work of some of the market agents, particularly model agents or 'bookers' and fashion buyers, shaping the aesthetics inside their markets. In analysing their work, Entwistle develops a theoretical framework for understanding the distinctive features of aesthetic marketplaces and the aesthetic calculations within them.




The Way We Look


Book Description

This revision of a classic text explains and applies the basic elements of design and aesthetics for a variety of apparel professionals, such as retail merchandisers, clothing designers, and fashion journalists. Using her own theory of the apparel-body-construct -- the look or appearance of the body, clothing, and accessories as a unit -- the author defines aesthetics in the context of understanding how we perceive dress and our reactions to it.Instructor's Guide provides course outlines, objectives, and additional application exercises.




Dressing the Man


Book Description

Dressing the Man is the definitive guide to what men need to know in order to dress well and look stylish without becoming fashion victims. Alan Flusser's name is synonymous with taste and style. With his new book, he combines his encyclopedic knowledge of men's clothes with his signature wit and elegance to address the fundamental paradox of modern men's fashion: Why, after men today have spent more money on clothes than in any other period of history, are there fewer well-dressed men than at any time ever before? According to Flusser, dressing well is not all that difficult, the real challenge lies in being able to acquire the right personalized instruction. Dressing well pivots on two pillars -- proportion and color. Flusser believes that "Permanent Fashionability," both his promise and goal for the reader, starts by being accountable to a personal set of physical trademarks and not to any kind of random, seasonally served-up collection of fashion flashes. Unlike fashion, which is obliged to change each season, the face's shape, the neck's height, the shoulder's width, the arm's length, the torso's structure, and the foot's size remain fairly constant over time. Once a man learns how to adapt the fundamentals of permanent fashion to his physique and complexion, he's halfway home. Taking the reader through each major clothing classification step-by-step, this user-friendly guide helps you apply your own specifics to a series of dressing options, from business casual and formalwear to pattern-on-pattern coordination, or how to choose the most flattering clothing silhouette for your body type and shirt collar for your face. A man's physical traits represent his individual road map, and the quickest route toward forging an enduring style of dress is through exposure to the legendary practitioners of this rare masculine art. Flusser has assembled the largest andmost diverse collection of stylishly mantled men ever found in one book. Many never-before-seen vintage photographs from the era of Cary Grant, Tyrone Power, and Fred Astaire are employed to help illustrate the range and diversity of authentic men's fashion. Dressing the Man's sheer magnitude of options will enable the reader to expand both the grammar and verbiage of his permanent-fashion vocabulary. For those men hoping to find sartorial fulfillment somewhere down the road, tethering their journey to the mind-set of permanent fashion will deliver them earlier rather than later in life.




Reforming Women's Fashion, 1850-1920


Book Description

This work focuses on the efforts toward reforming women's dress that took place in Europe and America in the latter half of the 18th century and the first decade of the 20th century, and the types of garments adopted by women to overcome the challenges posed by fashionable dress. It considers the many advocates for reform and examines their motives, their arguments for change, and how they promoted improvements in women's fashion. Though there was no single overarching dress reform movement, it reveals similarities among the arguments posed by diverse groups of reformers, including especially the equation of reform with an ideal image of improved health. Drawing on a variety of primary and secondary sources in the USA and Europe - including the popular press, advice books for women, allopathic and alternative medical literature, and books on aesthetics, art, health, and physical education - the text makes a significant contribution to costume studies, social history, and women's studies.