The Places and Spaces of Fashion, 1800-2007 brings together art, design, fashion, and a much neglected concern for its spatial realities. The spaces and places of fashion have often been overlooked in the writing of fashion history and visual culture. More often than not, however, these environments mitigate, control, inform, and enhance how fashion is experienced, performed, consumed, seen, exhibited, purchased, appreciated and of course displayed. Space, as this volume attempts to illustrate, is itself a representational strategy on par with and influencing the visibility and visuality of fashion. Innovative and challenging, the essays in this volume explore various physical and conceptual spaces, moving from physical environments to the two-dimensional with paintings, illustrations, and photographs to chart similarities, differences, and complex nuanced relationships between environments, fashion, identities, and visuality. The volume also navigates various sites (both permanent and temporary) of production, circulation, exhibition, consumption, and promotion of fashion that define meaning and knowledge about a culture or individual by providing for a bond between embodied consumers/spectators and fashion objects. The Places and Spaces of Fashion, 1800-2007 is a compelling project with a thematic, theoretical, and historiographic approach that is at once both focused yet far-reaching and original in its implications. The volume engages with questions attending to the ‘modern condition’ by seamlessly weaving interdisciplinary discussions of the visual with material culture to explore the spatial dimension(s) of fashion. Some of the essays explore new and exciting spaces while others offer compelling revisionary analyses of relatively known sources

This edited volume explores how fashion brands deal with legacy by looking at the preservation of heritage and knowledge and how this builds a bridge to the future. Bringing together different reflections from the world of fashion, from gloves to virtual jewels, from luxury brand’s digital narratives to historical contexts, each chapter offers a narrative that is contemporary, yet linked to historical contexts. With these narratives, the book reveals how innovation builds on heritage, and how locally rooted traditional techniques connect to contemporary global production. It illustrates how ancestral processes renew, encouraging us to produce and consume more responsibly. Split into three parts, the book firstly covers narrative and knowledge in different contexts before delving in to narrative, brand building and creativity with case studies. The final section centres on digital narratives with new consumers. Ultimately, this book demonstrates that multidisciplinary knowledge of the past is essential to the understanding of the contemporary.

How wealthy American women--as consumers and as influencers--helped shape French couture of the late nineteenth century; lavishly illustrated. French fashion of the late nineteenth century is known for its allure, its ineffable chic--think of John Singer Sargent's Madame X and her scandalously slipping strap. For Parisian couturiers and their American customers, it was also serious business. In Dressing Up, Elizabeth Block examines the couturiers' influential clientele--wealthy American women who bolstered the French fashion industry with a steady stream of orders from the United States. Countering the usual narrative of the designer as solo creative genius, Block shows that these women--as high-volume customers and as pre-Internet influencers--were active participants in the era's transnational fashion system. Block describes the arrival of nouveau riche Americans on the French fashion scene, joining European royalty, French socialites, and famous actresses on the client rosters of the best fashion houses--Charles Frederick Worth, Doucet, and Félix, among others. She considers the mutual dependence of couture and coiffure; the participation of couturiers in international expositions (with mixed financial results); the distinctive shopping practices of American women, which ranged from extensive transatlantic travel to quick trips downtown to the department store; the performance of conspicuous consumption at balls and soirées; the impact of American tariffs on the French fashion industry; and the emergence of smuggling, theft, and illicit copying of French fashions in the American market as the middle class emulated the preferences of the rich. Lavishly illustrated, with vibrant images of dresses, portraits, and fashion plates, Dressing Up reveals the power of American women in French couture. Winner of the Aileen Ribeiro Grant of the Association of Dress Historians; an Association for Art History grant; and a Pasold Research Fund grant.

The Logic of Innovation examines not merely the supposed problem of the efficacy and relevance of intellectual property, and the nature of innovation and creativity in a digital environment, but also the very circumstances of that inquiry itself. Social life has itself become a sphere of production, but how might that be understood within the cultural and structural transformation of creativity, innovation and property? Through a highly original interlocutory and therapeutic approach to the issues in play, the author addresses the concepts of innovation and the digital by means of an investigation through literature and the imagination of new scenarios for language, business and legal reform. The book undertakes a complex inquiry into innovation and property through the wonder of Alice’s journeys in Wonderland and through the Looking-glass. The author presents a new theory of familiar production to account for the kinship that has emerged in both informal and commercial modes of innovation, and foregrounds the value of use as crucial to the articulation of intellectual property within contemporary models of production and commercialization in the digital.

D_Tex is proposed as a hub around which it is possible to look at textiles in their different forms, in order to better understand, study, adapt and project them for the future. It is intended to build a flow of ideas and concepts so that participants can arrive at new ideas and concepts and work them in their own way, adapting them to their objectives and research. D_Tex is intended as a space for sharing and building knowledge around textile material in order to propose new understandings and explorations. Present in all areas of knowledge, the textile material bets on renewed social readings and its evolutions to constantly reinvent itself and enable innovative cultural and aesthetic dimensions and unexpected applications to solve questions and promote new knowledge. D_Tex proposes to promote discussion and knowledge in the different areas where textiles, with all their characteristics, can ensure an important contribution, combining material and immaterial knowledge, innovative and traditional techniques, technological and innovative materials and methods, but also new organization and service models, different concepts and views on teaching. With the renewed idea of the intrinsic interdisciplinarity of design and sharing with different areas that support each other, the research and practice of textiles was proposed by the D_TEX Textile Design Conference 2019, held June 19-21, 2019 at the Lisbon School of Architecture of the University of Lisbon, Portugal under the theme "In Touch" where, as broadly understood as possible, different areas of textiles were regarded as needing to keep in touch with each other and end users in order to promote and share the best they can offer for the welfare of their users and consumers.

Communicating in the Third Space aims to clarify Homi K. Bhabha’s theory of the third space of enunciation by reconstructing its philosophical, sociological, geographical, and political meaning with attention to the special advantages and ambiguities that arise as it is applied in practical--as well as theoretical--contexts. The idea of "third space" conceives the encounter of two distinct and unequal social groups as taking place in a special third space of enunciation where culture is disseminated and displaced from the interacting groups, making way for the invention of a hybrid identity, whereby these two groups conceive themselves to partake in a common identity relating to shared space and common dialogue. The essays collected in Communicating in the Third Space--including a preface by Bhabha himself--brilliantly introduce readers to this exciting topic in Cultural and Post-Colonial theory and offers insightful elaboration and critique of the meaning and relevance of life in the "third space." With a preface by Homi K. Bhabha.

Fashion and celebrity may be twenty-first century obsessions, but they were also key concepts in Regency culture. Both celebrated and condemned for their popularity, silver fork novels were extremely prolific during this period. This study looks at the social and literary impact of this significant genre.

Set against the background of a ‘general crisis’ that is environmental, political and social, this book examines a series of specific intersections between architecture and feminisms, understood in the plural. The collected essays and projects that make up the book follow transversal trajectories that criss-cross between ecologies, economies and technologies, exploring specific cases and positions in relation to the themes of the archive, control, work and milieu. This collective intellectual labour can be located amidst a worldwide depletion of material resources, a hollowing out of political power and the degradation of constructed and natural environments. Feminist positions suggest ways of ethically coping with a world that is becoming increasingly unstable and contested. The many voices gathered here are united by the task of putting critical concepts and feminist design tools to use in order to offer experimental approaches to the creation of a more habitable world. Drawing inspiration from the active archives of feminist precursors, existing and re-imagined, and by way of a re-engagement in the histories, theories and projected futures of critical feminist projects, the book presents a collection of twenty-three essays and eight projects, with the aim of taking stock of our current condition and re-engaging in our precarious environment-worlds.

“A revelation. Reclaiming fashion from its European history.” – Shane White With a focus on sub-Saharan Africa, Fashioning the Afropolis provides a range of innovative perspectives on global fashion, design, dress, photography, and the body in some of the major cities, with a focus on Lagos, Johannesburg, Dakar, and Douala. It contributes to the ongoing debates around the globalization of fashion and fashion theory by exploring fashion as a genuine urban phenomenon on the continent and among its diasporas. To date, “fashion” and “city” have not been systematically related to each other in the African context and, for too long, a western-centric gaze has dominated scholarship, resulting in the perception of Africa as provincial and its visual arts and textile cultures as static and folkloristic. This perspective is all the more distorted, given Africa's rich sartorial past. With a huge number of tailors ready to adapt and renew clothing, reshaping garments into contemporary styles, and many cities in Africa becoming hot-spots for a steadily growing and well-connected scene of fashion designers in the past 20 years, the time is ripe for a reevaluation and reconsideration of the fashionscapes of Africa. Leading scholars offer an updated empirical and theoretical foundation on which to base new and exciting research on sub-Saharan fashion, challenging perceptions and offering new insights.

In the first critical history of French ready-made fashion, Alexis Romano examines an array of cultural sources, including surviving garments, fashion magazines, film, photography and interviews, to weave together previously disparate historical narratives. The resulting volume – Prêt-à-Porter: Paris and Women – situates the ready-made in wider cultural discourses of art, design, urbanism, technology and international policy. Through a close study of fashion magazines, including Vogue and Elle, Romano reveals how the French ready-made and the genre of fashion photography in France developed in tandem. Analyses of representations of space, women and prêt-à-porter in such magazines – alongside other cultural ephemera such as contemporary film, documentary photography and family photographs – demonstrate that popular conceptions of fashion and modernity shifted in the period 1945-68. By connecting national and personal histories, Prêt-à-Porter: Paris and Women reveals the importance of the ready-made to broader narratives of postwar reconstruction, national identity, gender and international dialogue.