Fashion Talks is a vibrant look at the politics of everyday style. Shira Tarrant and Marjorie Jolles bring together essays that cover topics such as lifestyle Lolitas, Hollywood baby bumps, haute couture hijab, gender fluidity, steampunk, and stripper shoes, and engage readers with accessible and thoughtful analyses of real-world issues. This collection explores whether style can shift the limiting boundaries of race, class, gender, and sexuality, while avoiding the traps with which it attempts to rein us in. Fashion Talks will appeal to cultural critics, industry insiders, mainstream readers, and academic experts who are curious about the role fashion plays in the struggles over identity, power, and the status quo.

Essays on the politics of everyday style.

The Psychology of Fashion offers an insightful introduction to the exciting and dynamic world of fashion in relation to human behaviour, from how clothing can affect our cognitive processes to the way retail environments manipulate consumer behaviour. The book explores how fashion design can impact healthy body image, how psychology can inform a more sustainable perspective on the production and disposal of clothing, and why we develop certain shopping behaviours. With fashion imagery ever present in the streets, press and media, The Psychology of Fashion shows how fashion and psychology can make a positive difference to our lives.

“A powerful exposé of Parisian haute couture” – Book of the Week, Times Higher Education Fashion is one of the most powerful industries in the world, accounting for 6% of global consumption and growing steadily. Since the 1980s and the birth of the neoliberal economy, it has emerged as the glittering face of capitalism, bringing together prestige, power and beauty and occupying a central place in media and consumer fantasies. Yet the fashion industry, which claims to offer highly desirable job opportunities, relies significantly on job instability, not just in outsourced garment production but at the very heart of its creative production of luxury. Based on an in-depth investigation involving stylists, models, designers, hairdressers, make-up artists, photographers and interns, anthropologist Giulia Mensitieri goes behind fashion's glamorous facade to explore the lived realities of working in the industry. This challenging book lays bare the working conditions of 'the most beautiful job in the world,' showing that exploitation isn't confined to sweatshops abroad or sexual harassment of models, but exists at the very heart of the powerful symbolic and economic centre of fashion.

One of the most influential, admired, and colorful women of our time: fashion designer and philanthropist Diane von Furstenberg tells the most personal stories from her life, about family, love, beauty and business: “It’s so good, you’ll want to take notes” (People). Diane von Furstenberg started with a suitcase full of jersey dresses and an idea of who she wanted to be—in her words, “the kind of woman who is independent and who doesn’t rely on a man to pay her bills.” She has since become that woman, establishing herself as a major force in the fashion industry, all the while raising a family, maintaining that “my children are my greatest creation.” In The Woman I Wanted to Be, “an intriguing page-turner filled with revelations” (More), von Furstenberg reflects on her extraordinary life—from her childhood in Brussels to her days as a young, jet-set princess, to creating the dress that came to symbolize independence and power for generations of women. With remarkable honesty and wisdom, von Furstenberg mines the rich territory of what it means to be a woman. She opens up about her family and career, overcoming cancer, building a global brand, and devoting herself to empowering other women. This “inspiring, compelling, deliciously detailed celebrity autobiography…is as much of a smashing success as the determined, savvy, well-intentioned woman who wrote it” (Chicago Tribune).

An inspiring collection of quotes from The Talks, a much-loved online magazine featuring candid interviews with visionaries Over the last decade, The Talks has conducted more than 500 interviews with cultural visionaries - illuminating conversations with artists, actors, directors, chefs, fashion designers, architects, authors, musicians, and athletes. For this book, The Talks' founders Sven Schumann and Johannes Bonke have selected the finest quotes from those conversations and arranged them by category - including acting, advice, age, beauty, creativity, inspiration, love, money, nature, rebellion, and more. The result: a fast-paced, insightful look into the lives and minds of the creative voices of our time.

An illuminating introduction to the expanding influence of fashion from the perspectives of design, technology, sustainability, and business Fashion matters for the economy, to society, and to each of us personally. Faster than anything else, what we wear tells the story of who we are—or who we want to be. It is the most immediate form of self-expression. Yet even as fashion touches the lives of each and every one of us, its influence and the vast creative industry that it supports can seem mysterious to outsiders. In Why Fashion Matters Frances Corner, Head of London College of Fashion, guides readers into the dizzying world of this rapidly expanding, increasingly global, always exciting industry. In provocative and intriguing entries, Corner teases out the glorious intricacies and contradictions of an industry that simultaneously values technology and craft; timeless style and fast fashion; the bespoke and the mass-market; consumption and sustainability; cold, hard numbers; and creative expression. From “Shop 'til We Drop” to “The White Shirt” to “The One Trillion Dollar Business” each entry offers a unique avenue into fashion and its impact, both positive and negative, on lives around the globe.

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER “In I.M., Isaac Mizrahi puts his life to paper with the same mix of spirit and wryness as the designs he popularized.” —Vanity Fair Isaac Mizrahi is sui generis: designer, cabaret performer, talk-show host, a TV celebrity. Yet ever since he shot to fame in the late 1980s, the private Isaac Mizrahi has remained under wraps. Until now. In I.M., Isaac Mizrahi offers a poignant, candid, and touching look back on his life so far. Growing up gay in a sheltered Syrian Jewish Orthodox family, Isaac had unique talents that ultimately drew him into fashion and later into celebrity circles that read like a who’s who of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: Richard Avedon, Audrey Hepburn, Anna Wintour, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Meryl Streep, and Oprah Winfrey, to name only a few. In his elegant memoir, Isaac delves into his lifelong battles with weight, insomnia, and depression. He tells what it was like to be an out gay man in a homophobic age and to witness the ravaging effects of the AIDS epidemic. Brimming with intimate details and inimitable wit, Isaac's narrative reveals not just the glamour of his years, but the grit beneath the glitz. Rich with memorable stories from in and out of the spotlight, I.M. illuminates deep emotional truths.

Few phenomena embody the notion of time as well as fashion. Fast-moving and rooted in the 'now', it's constantly creating its own past through the process of rapid style change. Uniquely poised between the past and the future, fashion's relationship with time is unorthodox. Rather than considering time in the conventional sense, this anthology explores three alternative ways to think about fashion and time: the first identifies the seasonal nature of fashion as an industry, and shows how this has impacted on workers and wearers alike. The second looks at fashion design as a ceaseless process of adaptation, reconstruction and recombination of motifs, in which nostalgia and revivals play their part. The third construes fashion's 'imaginary', with its capacity for fantasy and myth-making, as a form of alternate history that asks 'what if?' Within this framework, key classic texts are juxtaposed with lesser known ones, in an interdisciplinary approach that includes philosophy, history, literature, media and fashion design, ranging from the 18th century to the present. It will be of interest to anyone wishing to understand one of the most complex yet inescapable aspects of fashion, its relationship to time, and will be a critical resource for undergraduate and postgraduate students in the humanities and all those interested in fashion in all its creative, commercial and cultural aspects.

The book takes the reader through all the major steps of fashion portfolio creation. It features the main components of the design process from the identification of inspiration sources and fashion trends research to conceptualization of a complete fashion collection. The topics covered include mood/fabric boards development, creation of original and innovative textiles as well as fashion silhouettes and garment details development through extensive research, quick design sketching, fabric manipulation, and draping experimentation. Great original designs and illustrations by the author as well as design sketch samples by established designers are provided throughout. There are samples of sketchbooks from professional and emerging fashion artists. The book provides some insight from established fashion and accessories designers on the highlights and challenges of the creative process. It is a great professional reference for techniques in the portfolio development. A beautiful but practical book that provides useful techniques and helps the reader get inside the mind of the designer.