A richly illustrated, comprehensive study of fashion under socialism, from state-sponsored prototypes to unofficial imitations of Paris fashion. The idea of fashion under socialism conjures up images of babushka headscarves and black market blue jeans. And yet, as Djurdja Bartlett shows in this groundbreaking book, the socialist East had an intimate relationship with fashion. Official antagonism—which cast fashion as frivolous and anti-revolutionary—eventually gave way to grudging acceptance and creeping consumerism. Bartlett outlines three phases in socialist fashion, and illustrates them with abundant images from magazines of the period: postrevolutionary utopian dress, official state-sanctioned socialist fashion, and samizdat-style everyday fashion. Utopian dress, ranging from the geometric abstraction of the constructivists under Bolshevism in the Soviet Union to the no-frills desexualized uniform of a factory worker in Czechoslovakia, reflected the revolutionary urge for a clean break with the past. The highly centralized socialist fashion system, part of Stalinist industrialization, offered official prototypes of high fashion that were never available in stores—mythical images of smart and luxurious dresses that symbolized the economic progress that socialist regimes dreamed of. Everyday fashion, starting in the 1950s, was an unofficial, do-it-yourself enterprise: Western fashions obtained through semiclandestine channels or sewn at home. The state tolerated the demand for Western fashion, promising the burgeoning middle class consumer goods in exchange for political loyalty. Bartlett traces the progress of socialist fashion in the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, East Germany, Poland, and Yugoslavia, drawing on state-sponsored socialist women's magazines, etiquette books, socialist manuals on dress, private archives, and her own interviews with designers, fashion editors, and other key figures. Fashion, she suggests, with all its ephemerality and dynamism, was in perpetual conflict with the socialist regimes' fear of change and need for control. It was, to echo the famous first sentence from the Communist Manifesto, the spectre that haunted socialism until the end.

The Green Travel Guide is the travel guide for the future. It tells us how to travel without destroying the very places we want to visit.Written by Greg Neale, environment correspondent for The Sunday Telegraph, it is packed with practical advice for travellers. The second edition includes a whole new section on how to take different kinds of activity holidays, from wildlife watching and conservation to heritage, sports and back-to-the-land holidays. For each of them, detailed tips are given on how to minimise the environmental damage and the social disruption that travel and tourism so often bring. The guide to each area of the world and the listings of award-winning organisations and useful contacts have all been expanded and brought up to date.

Sociohistorical Linguistics in Southeast Asia blends insights from sociolinguistics, descriptive linguistics and historical-comparative linguistics to shed new light on regional Tibeto-Burman language varieties and their relationships across spatial, temporal and cultural differences. The approach is inspired by leading Tibeto-Burmanist, David Bradley, to whom the book is dedicated. The volume includes twelve original research essays written by eleven Tibeto-Burmanists drawing on first-hand field research in five countries to explore Tibeto-Burman languages descended from seven internal sub-branches. Following two introductory chapters, each contribution is focused on a specific Tibeto-Burman language or sub-branch, collectively contributing to the literature on language identification, language documentation, typological analysis, historical-comparative classification, linguistic theory, and language endangerment research with new analyses, state-of-the-art summaries and contemporary applications.

This is the first book to explore color history in Asia. Color is a natural phenomenon and a fundamental element of the universe, and offers a medium to communicate with others globally. It is a language of signals, such as traffic lights, signs or symbols, and an essential part of society. Color attracts people’s attention and transmits important information. As such, color language denotes all of the activities of human history, and has been associated with changes in society, economic development, and dynasties replacing the old with the new. The book brings together many elements of Chinese history with reference to the topic of ‘color’ and has evolved from the authors’ respective interests in art and design, teaching and research, consultancy and publishing. The topic will be of increasing importance in the future as a consequence of China’s increasing influence in the sphere of global culture. For practitioners of art and design, the book will be a valuable resource; for the general public, interested in the development of Chinese aesthetics over the centuries, it will provide a new perspective complimentary to existing studies about art, design and the history of the region.

The brilliant kaleidoscope of everyday creativity in Israel is thrown into relief in this study, which teases out the abiding national tensions and contradictions at work in the expressive acts of ordinary people. Hagar Salamon examines creativity in Israel's public sphere through the lively discourse of bumper stickers, which have become a potent medium for identity and commentary on national and religious issues. Exploring the more private expressive sphere of women's embroidery, she profiles a group of Jerusalem women who meet regularly and create "folk embroidery." Salamon also considers the significance of folk expressions at the intersections of the public and private that rework change and embrace transformation. Far ranging and insightful, Israel in the Making captures the complex creative essence of a nation state and vividly demonstrates how its citizens go about defining themselves, others, and their country every day.