Gone are the days when fashion relied on a runway launch with coinciding press promotions to show a couturier's new range. Today, design houses are thinking beyond traditional methods of display to stimulate interest in their collections, such as to the internet, fashion film and, more recently, fashion installations. This book offers a critical evaluation of the changing ways in which fashion has been exhibited, focusing specifically on the recent turn toward installation, whether in the form of static presentations, interactive performances or the more conventional curated designer exhibition. Connecting viewers – and consumers – on an immersive level, the fashion world has begun to appropriate installation methods traditionally associated with displays of experimental art, transcending the runway system and its constraints. This book turns to the designers who have pioneered fashion installations, such as Aitor Throup, Muccia Prada, Walter Van Beirendonck and Hussein Chalayan among others, and also looks back to the early influential fashion displays by designers such as Worth and Poiret to provide historical context. Divided into three parts, and covering a variety of installations from Vivienne Westwood's fashioned 'concept' stores to Gareth Pugh's immersive films, this ground-breaking book positions the designer as the curator and exhibition-maker and offers the first focused study of the pertinent concept of fashion installation.

The Handbook of Fashion Studies identifies an innovative spectrum of thematic approaches, key strands and interdisciplinary concepts that continue to push forward the boundaries of fashion studies. The book is divided into seven sections: Fashion, Identity and Difference; Spaces of Fashion; Fashion and Materiality; Fashion, Agency and Policy; Science, Technology and New fashion; Fashion and Time and, Sustainable Fashion in a Globalised world. Each section consists of approximately four essays authored by established researchers in the field from the UK, USA, Netherlands, Sweden, Canada and Australia. The essays are written by international subject specialists who each engage with their section's theme in the light of their own discipline and provide clear case-studies to further knowledge on fashion. This consistency provides clarity and permits comparative analysis. The handbook will be essential reading for students of fashion as well as professionals in the industry.

The alarming level of greenhouse gases in the environment, fast depleting natural resources and the increasing level of industrial effluents, have made every single manufacturing activity come under the scrutiny of sustainability. When all kinds of waste such as clothes, furniture, carpets, televisions, shoes, paper, food wastes etc. end up in the landfill, only a few of them are naturally decomposed and thus a large majority remains as non-biodegradable. It is for this reason, efforts are concentrated to reduce the burden on earth by this waste, and as far as used textile products are concerned, there are now attempts to recycle or up-cycle. This book addresses the role of sustainability by using textile waste in fashion and textiles with respect to manufacturing, materials, as well as the economic and business challenges and opportunities it poses. This wide-ranging book comprises 19 chapters on the various topics including: · Solutions for sustainable fashion and textile industry · Agro and bio waste in the fashion industry · Innovating fashion brands by using textile waste · Waste in handloom textiles · Business paradigm shifting: 21st century fashion from recycling and upcycling · Utilization of natural waste for sustainable textile coloration · Circular economy in fashion and textile from waste · Future pathways of waste utilization for fashion · Sustainable encapsulation of natural dyes from Plant waste for textiles · Agro-waste applications for bio-remediation of textile effluent

Pop art has traditionally been the most visible visual art within popular culture because its main transgression is easy to understand: the infiltration of the “low” into the “high”. The same cannot be said of contemporary art of the 21st century, where the term “Gaga Aesthetics” characterizes the condition of popular culture being extensively imbricated in high culture, and vice-versa. Taking Adorno and Horkheimer's "The Culture Industry" and Adorno's Aesthetic Theory as key touchstones, this book explores the dialectic of high and low that forms the foundation of Adornian aesthetics and the extent to which it still applied, and the extent to which it has radically shifted, thereby 'upending tradition'. In the tradition of philosophical aesthetics that Adorno began with Lukács, this explores the ever-urgent notion that high culture has become deeply enmeshed with popular culture. This is “Gaga Aesthetics”: aesthetics that no longer follows clear fields of activity, where “fine art” is but one area of critical activity. Indeed, Adorno's concepts of alienation and the tragic, which inform his reading of the modernist experiment, are now no longer confined to art. Rather, stirring examples can be found in phenomena such as fashion and music video. In addition to dealing with Lady Gaga herself, this book traverses examples ranging from Madonna's Madam X to Moschino and Vetements, to deliberate on the strategies of subversion in the culture industry.

An encyclopaedic selection of 111 garments, footwear, and accessories - from humble masterpieces to high fashion - that have had a strong impact on society in the 20th and 21st centuries and continue to hold currency today. Published to accompany the first major exhibition on fashion design at The Museum of Modern Art since 1944, Items: Is Fashion Modern? presents 111 iconic garments, footwear and accessories that have strongly influenced society in the 20th and 21st- centuries and continue to hold currency today. Organized alphabetically as a reference book, the publication examines the ways in which these items are designed, manufactured, distributed and used, while exploring the wide range of relationships between clothing and functionality, cultural etiquettes, aesthetics, politics and technology. Designs as wellknown and transformative as the Levi's 501s, the pearl necklace, the sari and Yves Saint Laurent's Le Smoking - and as ancient and historically rich as the Breton sweater, the kippah, and the keffiyeh - are included, allowing for exploration of the numerous issues these items have produced and shaped over many decades. Richly illustrated with historical and archival imagery as well as newly commissioned photography from Omar Victor Diop, Bobby Doherty, Catherine Losing, Monika Mogi and Kristin-Lee Moolman, Items reflects not only on fashion's power and social history, but also on its design construct and staying power, in order to understand what of the system of fashion should remain for generations to come - and what alterations need to be made to ensure a tenable future for this arena that touches us all.

This book is a multi-faceted, interdisciplinary examination of the music and figure of Lady Gaga, combining approaches from scholars in cultural studies, art, fashion, and music. It represents one of the first scholarly volumes devoted to Lady Gaga, who has become, over a few short years, central to both popular (and, indeed, populist) as well as more scholarly thought in these areas and who, the contributors argue, is helping to shape—directly and indirectly—thought and culture both in the fields of the "scholarly" and the "everyday." Lady Gaga's output is firmly embedded in a self-consciously intellectual pop culture tradition, and her music videos are intertextually linked to icons of pop culture intelligentsia like Alfred Hitchcock and open to multiple interpretations. In examining her music and figure, this volume contributes both to debates on the status of intertextuality, held in tension with originality, and to debates on the figuring of the sexualized female body, and representations of disability. There is interest in these issues from a wide range of disciplines: popular musicology, film studies, queer studies, women’s studies, gender studies, disability studies, popular culture studies, and the burgeoning sub-discipline of aesthetics and philosophy of fashion.

In Film and Video Intermediality, Janna Houwen innovatively rewrites the concept of medium specificity in order to answer the questions “what is meant by video?” and “what is meant by film?” How are these two media (to be) understood? How can film and video be defined as distinct, specific media? In this era of mixed moving media, it is vital to ask these questions precisely and especially on the media of video and film. Mapping the specificity of film and video is indispensable in analyzing and understanding the many contemporary intermedial objects in which film and video are mixed or combined.

The Japanese fashion designer Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons is undoubtedly one of the world's major fashion designers. In 2017 she was the second living designer to ever be given a retrospective at the renowned Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Her work exerts an extraordinary influence over succeeding generations of designers and is a major point of reference for all those wishing to explore the place of fashion in contemporary culture. The 14 essays in this collection, written by eminent fashion theorists from around the world, ask what is the relationship of Kawakubo's work to art, philosophy and architecture, and ultimately illustrate how Kawakubo's creative output allows us to understand the very notion of fashion itself.

What is the place of materiality—the expression or condition of physical substance—in our visual age of rapidly changing materials and media? How is it fashioned in the arts or manifested in virtual forms? In Surface, cultural critic and theorist Giuliana Bruno deftly explores these questions, seeking to understand materiality in the contemporary world. Arguing that materiality is not a question of the materials themselves but rather the substance of material relations, Bruno investigates the space of those relations, examining how they appear on the surface of different media—on film and video screens, in gallery installations, or on the skins of buildings and people. The object of visual studies, she contends, goes well beyond the image and engages the surface as a place of contact between people and art objects. As Bruno threads through these surface encounters, she unveils the fabrics of the visual—the textural qualities of works of art, whether manifested on canvas, wall, or screen. Illuminating the modern surface condition, she notes how façades are becoming virtual screens and the art of projection is reinvented on gallery walls. She traverses the light spaces of artists Robert Irwin, James Turrell, Tacita Dean, and Anthony McCall; touches on the textured surfaces of Isaac Julien’s and Wong Kar-wai’s filmic screens; and travels across the surface materiality in the architectural practices of Diller Scofidio + Renfro and Herzog & de Meuron to the art of Doris Salcedo and Rachel Whiteread, where the surface tension of media becomes concrete. In performing these critical operations on the surface, she articulates it as a site in which different forms of mediation, memory, and transformation can take place. Surveying object relations across art, architecture, fashion, design, film, and new media, Surface is a magisterial account of contemporary visual culture.