Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

From its beginnings in the fifteenth century, intensified interest in fashion and the study of fashion over the last thirty years has led to a vast and varied literature on the subject.

This collection of essays surveys and contextualizes the ways in which a wide range of disciplines have used a variety of theoretical approaches to explain, and sometimes to explain away, the astonishing variety, complexity and beauty of fashion. Themes covered include individual, social and gender identity, the erotic, consumption and communication.

By collecting together some of the most influential and important writers on fashion and exposing the ideas and theories behind what they say, this unique collection of extracts and essays brings to light the presuppositions involved in the things we think and say about fashion.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Series editor's preface (p. xi)
• Acknowledgements (p. xiii)
• Introduction (p. 1)
• Part 1 Fashion and fashion theories
• 1 Explaining it Away (p. 15)
• 2 The Empire of Fashion: Introduction (p. 25)
• Part 2 Fashion and history/fashion in history
• 3 Fashion (p. 39)
• 4 Fashion Has Its Laws (p. 46)
• 5 Peter Stallybrass (p. 58)
• 6 A Century of Fashion (p. 76)
• Part 3 What fashion is and is not
• 7 Antifashion: The Vicissitudes of Negation (p. 89)
• 8 Is Fashion a True Art Form? (p. 103)
• Part 4 What fashion and clothing do
• 9 Joanne Bubolz Eicher (p. 109)
• 10 Why Do People Wear Clothes? (p. 122)
• 11 Protection (p. 126)
• Part 5 Fashion as communication
• 12 Social Life as a Sign System (p. 143)
• 13 Do Clothes Speak? What Makes Them Fashion? (p. 148)
• 14 When the Meaning is Not a Message: A Critique of the Consumption as Communication Thesis (p. 159)
• 15 Fashion Statements: Communication and Culture (p. 170)
• Part 6 Fashion: identity and difference
• Sex and gender
• 16 Express Yourself: The Politics of Dressing Up (p. 191)
• 17 Objectifying Gender: The Stiletto Heel (p. 197)
• 18 'Power Dressing' and the Construction of the Career Woman (p. 208)
• Social class
• 19 Popular Fashion and Working-Class Affluence (p. 220)
• 20 Fashion: From Class Differentiation to Collective Selection (p. 232)
• Ethnicity and race
• 21 Great Aspirations: Hip Hop and Fashion Dress for Excess and Success (p. 247)
• 22 Oppositional Dress (p. 253)
• Culture and subculture
• 23 Style (p. 256)
• Part 7 Fashion, clothes and the body
• 24 Addressing the Body (p. 273)
• 25 Anchoring the (Postmodern) Self? Body Modification, Fashion and Identity (p. 292)
• 26 Lumbar Thought (p. 315)
• 27 The Comfort of Identity (p. 318)
• Part 8 Production and consumption
• 28 Dress as an Expression of the Pecuniary Culture (p. 339)
• 29 The Fetishism of the Commodity and Its Secret (p. 347)
• 30 Fashion: Unpacking a Cultural Production (p. 351)
• 31 Consuming or Living with Things?/Wearing it Out (p. 373)
• Part 9 Modern fashion
• 32 Adorned in Dreams: Introduction (p. 393)
• 33 Modernism and Fashion: A Social Psychological Interpretation (p. 398)
• 34 Public Roles/Personality in Public (p. 408)
• 35 Benjamin and the Revolution of Fashion in Modernity (p. 422)
• Part 10 Post-modern fashion
• 36 The Ideological Genesis of Needs/Fetishism and Ideology (p. 451)
• 37 Fashion, or the Enchanting Spectacle of the Code (p. 462)
• 38 A Tale of Inscription/Fashion Statements (p. 475)
• 39 Deconstruction Fashion! The Making of Unfinished, Decomposing and Re-assembled Clothes (p. 489)
• Part 11 Fashion and (the) image
• 40 Fashion Photography (p. 517)
• 41 Fashion Photography. The Double-Page Spread: Helmut Newton, Guy Bourdin & Deborah Turbeville (p. 520)
• 42 'Doing Fashion Photographs' (p. 527)
• 43 Fashion & Graphics: Introduction/Aboud Sodano and Paul Smith (p. 534)
• Part 12 Fashion, fetish and the erotic
• 44 Fetishism (p. 553)
• 45 The Special Historic and Psychological Role of Tight-Lacing (p. 558)
• 46 Fashion and Fetishism (p. 576)
• 47 Female Fetishism (p. 585)
• 48 'Where the Garment Gapes' (p. 601)
• Index (p. 603)