Includes bibliographical references and index.

I. Fashion and fashion theories : Explaining it away / Elizabeth Wilson -- The empire of fashion: introduction / Gilles Lipovetsky -- II. Fashion and history/fashion in history : Fashion / Edward Sapir -- Fashion has its laws / Agnes Brooks Young -- Renaissance clothing and the materials of memory / Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass -- A century of fashion / Gilles Lipovetsky -- III. What fashion is and is not : Antifashion: the vicissitudes of negation / Fred Davis -- Is fashion a true art form? / Zandra Rhodes and Alice Rawsthorn -- IV. What fashion and clothing do : The language of personal adornment / Mary Ellen Roach and Joanne Bubolz Eicher -- Why do people wear clothes? / Elizabeth Rouse -- Protection / John Flügel -- V. Fashion as communication : Social file as a sign system / Umberto Eco -- Do clothes speak?: What makes them fashion? / Fred Davis -- When the meaning is not a message: a critique of the consumption as communication thesis / Colin Campbell -- Fashion statements: communication and culture / Malcolm Barnard -- VI. Fashion: identity and difference : Sex and gender : Express yourself: the politics of dressing up / Tim Edwards -- Objectifying gender: the stiletto heel / Lee Wright -- 'Power dressing' and the construction of the career woman / Joanne Entwistle -- Social class : Popular fashion and working-class affluence / Angela Partington -- Fashion: from class differentiation to collective selection / Herbert Blumer -- Ethnicity and race : Great aspirations: hip hop and fashion dress for excess and success / Emil Wilbekin -- Oppositional dress / Elizabeth Wilson -- Culture and subculture : Style / Dick Hebdige -- VII. Fashion clothes and the body : Addressing the body / Joanne Entwistle -- Anchoring the (postmodern) self?: Body modification, fashion and identity / Paul Sweetman -- Lumbar thought / Umberto Eco -- The comfort of identity / Ruth Holliday -- 8. Production and consumption : Dress as an expression of the pecuniary culture / Thorstein Veblen -- The fetishism of the commodity and its secret / Karl Marx -- Fashion: unpacking a cultural production / Peter Braham -- Consuming or living with things? : Wearing it out / Tim Dant -- 9. Modern fashion : Adorned in dreams: introduction / Elizabeth Wilson -- Modernism and fashion: a social psychological interpretation / Kurt W. Back -- Public roles: personality in public / Richard Sennett -- Benjamin and the revolution of fashion in modernity / Ulrich Lehmann -- 10. Post-modern fashion : The ideological genesis of needs: Fetishism and ideology ; Fashion, or the enchanting spectacle of the code / Jean Baudrillard -- A tale of inscription: fashion statements / Kim Sawchuk -- Deconstruction fashion: the making of unfinished, decomposing and re-assembled clothes / Alison Gill -- 11. Fashion and (the) image : Fashion photography / Roland Barthes -- Fashion photography: the double-page spread: Helmut Newton, Guy Bourdin & Deborah Turbeville / Rosetta Brooks -- 'Doing fashion photographs' / Erica Lennard -- Fashion & graphics: introduction: Aboud Sodano and Paul Smith / Tamsin Blanchard -- 12. Fashion, fetish and the erotic : Fetishism / Sigmund Freud -- The special historic and psychological role of tight-lacing / David Kunzle -- Fashion and fetishism / Valerie Steele -- Female fetishism / Lorraine Gamman and Merja Makinen -- 'Where the garment gapes' / Roland Barthes.

This collection of essays surveys and contextualises the ways in which a wide range of disciplines have used different theoretical approaches to explain, and sometimes to explain away, the variety, complexity and beauty of fashion.

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