Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Material Strategies brings together scholars from different disciplines to explore what dress and textiles can tell us about gender history.

Broad in scope - covers women, men, social groupings and nations from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. Rich in detail - incorporates illustrations that provide visual evidence for gendered strategies of dress. Combines perspectives from design and textile history, business history, cultural anthropology, social history, art history and cultural history. Considers 'material strategies' in relation to production and consumption, the public and the private, the body and sexuality, and national identity. Written in a jargon-free style, making it accessible to readers from a wide range of backgrounds.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Introduction
• Material Strategies Engendered:
• Part I Dress, Textiles and Social Transitions in Pre-industrial Europe
• 1 Fashion, Time and the Consumption of a Renaissance Man in Germany
• The Costume Book of Matthaus Schwarz of Augsburg, 1496-1564
• 2 Reflections on Gender and Status Distinction
• An Analysis of the Liturgical Textiles Recorded in Mid-Sixteenth-Century London
• Maria Hayward (University of Southampton)
• Part II Identity and Eroticism, Consumption and Production, from the Early Seventeenth to the Mid-Twentieth Century
• 1 Following Suit: Men, Masculinity and Gendered Practices in the Clothing Trade in Leeds, England, 1890-1940
• 2 Pocketing the Difference: Gender and Pockets in Nineteenth-Century Britain:
• 3 Fashioning the American Man: The Arrow Collar Man, 1907-1931
• 4 Erotic Modesty: (ad)dressing Female Sexuality and Propriety in Open and Closed Drawers, USA, 1800-1930
• Part III Fashion Strategies for Reconfiguring Nations and Social Groups in the Early Twentieth Century
• 1 'De-Humanised Females and Amzonians'
• British Wartime Fashion and its Representation in Home Chat, 1914-1918
• 2 Fashion, the Politics of Style and National Identity in Pre-Fascist and Fascist Italy:
• 3 Style and Subversion: Postwar Poses and the Neo-Edwardian Suit in Mid-Twentieth-Century Britain:
• 4 'Anti-Mini Militants Meet Modern Misses': Urban Style, Gender and the Politics of 'National Culture' in 1960s Dar es Salaam, Tanzania:
• 5 Dressing for Leadership in China: Wives and Husbands in an Age of Revolutions (1911-1976):

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

Western social historians are finally focusing on visual aspects of clothing, and finding within gender studies that dress can be valuable for revealing issues, attitudes, and changes on both surface and subliminal levels. These 12 well-researched, historically based essays by 11 (mostly British) scholars cover a broad spectrum, from a 16th-century German costume book metaphysically analyzing one person's lifetime and clothing to the 20th-century public clothing of three Chinese political leaders and their spouses. Since most essays treat "before-and-after" transitions, such as the de-emphasis of liturgical textiles during the English Reformation and fashion changes before and during Italy's fascist regime, this small volume's title might more appropriately be "Material Strategies during Social Change: Dress and Gender from Historical Perspectives." Not all the essays involve a stratagem, but all are involved with change. Essay topics are so dispersed that they need tighter interpretation. Chapter headings could benefit from simplification and narrower focus. While the work contributes to interdisciplinary knowledge of gendered clothing and society, it is not unique in representing a new dress and textile history, as its editors claim. Berg Publisher's 20-plus-volume "Dress, Body, Culture" series does that. Extensive footnotes. ^BSumming Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above. B. B. Chico Regis University