Fashion is ever-changing, and while some styles mark a dramatic departure from the past, many exhibit subtle differences from year to year that are not always easily identifiable. With overviews of each key period and detailed illustrations for each new style, How to Read a Dress is an appealing and accessible guide to women's fashion across five centuries. Each entry includes annotated color images of historical garments, outlining important features and highlighting how styles have developed over time, whether in shape, fabric choice, trimming, or undergarments. Readers learn how garments were constructed and where their inspiration stemmed from at key points in history - as well as how dresses have varied in type, cut, detailing and popularity according to the occasion and the class, age and social status of the wearer.
This new edition includes additional styles to illustrate and explain the journey between one style and another; larger images to allow closer investigation of details of dress; examples of lower and working-class, as well as middle-class, clothing; and a completely new chapter covering the 1980s to 2020. The latter demonstrates how the late 20th century and early 21st century firmly left the dress behind as a requirement, but retained it as a perennially popular choice and illustrates how far the traditional boundaries of 'the dress' have been pushed (even including reference to a newly non-binary appreciation of the garment), and the intellectual shifts in the way women's fashion is both inspired and inspires. With these new additions, How to Read a Dress, revised edition, presents a complete and up-to-date picture of 'the dress' in all its forms, across the centuries, and taking into account different sartorial and social experiences. It is the ideal tool for anyone who has ever wanted to know their cartridge pleats from their R camier ruffles. Equipping the reader with all the information they need to 'read' a dress, this is the ultimate guide for students, researchers, and anyone interested in historical fashion.Rozsika Parker's re-evaluation of the reciprocal relationship between women and embroidery has brought stitchery out from the private world of female domesticity into the fine arts, created a major breakthrough in art history and criticism, and fostered the emergence of today's dynamic and expanding crafts movements.
The Subversive Stitch is now available again with a new Introduction that brings the book up to date with exploration of the stitched art of Louise Bourgeois and Tracey Emin, as well as the work of new young female and male embroiderers. Rozsika Parker uses household accounts, women's magazines, letters, novels and the works of art themselves to trace through history how the separation of the craft of embroidery from the fine arts came to be a major force in the marginalisation of women's work. Beautifully illustrated, her book also discusses the contradictory nature of women's experience of embroidery: how it has inculcated female subservience while providing an immensely pleasurable source of creativity, forging links between women.Fashion is ever-changing, and while some styles mark a dramatic departure from the past, many exhibit subtle differences from year to year that are not always easily identifiable. With overviews of each key period and detailed illustrations for each new style, How to Read a Suit is an authoritative visual guide to the under-explored area of men's fashion across four centuries.
Each entry includes annotated color images of historical garments, outlining important features and highlighting how styles have developed over time, whether in shape, fabric choice, trimming, or undergarments. Readers will learn how garments were constructed and where their inspiration stemmed from at key points in history - as well as how menswear has varied in type, cut, detailing and popularity according to the occasion and the class, age and social status of the wearer. This lavishly illustrated book is the ideal tool for anyone who has ever wanted to know their Chesterfield from their Ulster coat. Equipping the reader with all the information they need to 'read' menswear, this is the ultimate guide for students, researchers, and anyone interested in historical fashion.From insidious murder weapons to blaze-igniting crinolines, clothing has been the cause of death, disease and madness throughout history, by accident and design. Clothing is designed to protect, shield and comfort us, yet lurking amongst seemingly innocuous garments we find hats laced with mercury, frocks laden with arsenic and literally 'drop-dead gorgeous' gowns.
Fabulously gory and gruesome, Fashion Victims takes the reader on a fascinating journey through the lethal history of women's, men's and children's dress, in myth and reality. Drawing upon surviving fashion objects and numerous visual and textual sources, encompassing louse-ridden military uniforms, accounts of the fiery deaths of Oscar Wilde's half-sisters and dancer Isadora Duncan's accidental strangulation by entangled scarf; the book explores how garments have tormented those who made and wore them, and harmed animals and the environment in the process. Vividly chronicling evidence from Greek mythology to the present day, Matthews David puts everyday apparel under the microscope and unpicks the dark side of fashion. Fashion Victims is lavishly illustrated with over 125 images and is a remarkable resource for everyone from scholars and students to fashion enthusiasts.The second edition of The Fundamentals of Interior Design provides a thorough introduction to the key elements of interior design and the ideas that underpin them. The book describes the entirety of the creative process, from researching initial ideas to realizing them in three-dimensional form. Throughout the text, guidelines are given to provide structure to the interior design process and the reader is encouraged to adapt and initiate methodologies to suit individual project needs. This approach is intended to give designers a belief in their own abilities, and the confidence to tackle different projects with the unique challenges that each one brings.
The book features a variety of diagrams and talking points to encourage students and practitioners to think about key issues such as understanding spatial relationships and the use of sustainable materials. This second edition includes new case studies focusing on well-known international interior design studios, such as Conran and Partners, UK, Slade Architecture, US, Gensler, US and award winning architects Chae-Pereira in South Korea. The introduction of interviews with contemporary interior designers allows readers an insight in to the working world of interior design. The new projects allow students to explore what they have learned in each chapter through experimentation and these activities encourage creativity and further learning.Where do design principles come from? Are they abstract rules established by professionals or do they have roots in human experience? And if we encounter these visual phenomena in our everyday lives, how do designers use them to attract our attention, orient our behavior, and create compelling and memorable communication that stands out among the thousands of messages we confront each day? Today's work in visual communication design shifts emphasis from simply designing objects to designing experiences; to crafting form that acknowledges cognitive and cultural influences on interpretation.
In response, Meredith Davis and Jamer Hunt provide a new slant on design basics from the perspective of audiences and users. Chapters break down our interactions with communication as a sequence of meaningful episodes, each with related visual concepts that shape the interpretive experience. Explanatory illustrations and professional design examples support definitions of visual concepts and discussions of context. Work spans print, screen, and environmental applications from around the world. This introduction to visual communication design demystifies the foundational concepts that underpin professional design decisions and shape our experiences in a complex visual world.It is so good, after so many years of public indifference, even hostility towards Vincent and his work, to feel towards the end of my life that the battle is won.'
JO VAN GOGH-BONGER TO GUSTAVE COQUIOT, 1922
Zero Waste Fashion Design combines practical examples, flat patterns and more than 20 exercises to help you incorporate this sustainable technique into your portfolio. There are also beautifully illustrated interviews with innovative designers, including Richard Lindgvist, Mary Beth Bentaha and Daniel Desanto to show how sustainable practice continues to evolve within industry.
Industry pioneers, Timo Rissanen and Holly McQuillan, offer flexible strategies and easy-to-master zero waste techniques to help you develop your own cutting-edge fashion designs. This updated edition includes new content on integrating 3D design into a zero waste process, additional coverage of the historical context of zero waste around the world, and expands on the related technique of subtraction cutting to make this the ultimate practical guide to sustainable fashion design.An original contribution to fashion studies, Fashion in American Life challenges existing approaches to fashion in America by considering who 'makes' fashion-when, where, and how. Avoiding the usual emphasis on the 'history of fashion' which perpetuates the myth of fashion designers, and New York, as the originators of American fashion, this exploration of the everyday allows us to see American fashion as a form of agency, self-identification, creative engagement, and politics.
Moving away from the well-trodden accounts of fashion designers and the dominance of New York, much of the fashion uncovered has been under-represented in previous accounts. Through contemporary and historical research, authors challenge the nature of both 'fashion' and 'America' by addressing the many complexities of a nation whose people have diverse histories and cultures, including stories and experiences that have been forgotten, marginalized and left out of the fashion 'canon'. Race, gender, ethnicity, and class are employed as critical lenses to shed new light on how fashion might be defined and addressed within America (as a country, but not as a series of United States), with case studies looking at First Nations, Latinx and African American dress. The intellectual framing of the volume, and the methods and case studies included, also present tactics that can be applied to other contexts, making this book about revisiting 'fashion' more widely, not just in America. Fashion in American Life makes a unique contribution to the literature of fashion studies, fashion history, cultural studies, and beyond.What do Persian robes of honour, 20th-century still-life painting, fur garments, and 18th-century porcelain all have in common? Prized, possessed and modelled, they highlight the deep connections we share with cultural objects.
Establishing new connections between people and things via artistic media and material culture, this highly interdisciplinary volume brings together both established and emerging scholars in the fields of art history, material culture, museum and heritage studies and literary studies to investigate the intersection of the personal with the material. Raising vital questions of cultural identity, belonging and selfhood, Material Selves is the first book of its kind to consider the relationship between people and things across transcultural and transhistorical contexts. It employs innovative methodologies across ten chapters and critically expands on current models for understanding the dynamic relationship between people and things by tracing the central role objects have played in the construction, creation and performance of identity throughout history. Structured around four key sections exploring biography and narrative; adornment and ornament; reclamation and intervention; and subjects and objects, the volume presents a global selection of case studies that explore, amongst other things, Margaret Olley's enduring fame, the significance of the Khil'a in Safavid Persia and early modern Europe, and 17th-century French painter Charles LeBrun's royal portraiture. Fusing these with contemporary theories of identity, the contributors provide analyses informed by posthumanism, the environmental humanities, race and gender. At the same time, they confront vital questions of identity, agency, and materiality, and highlight the way in which we use objects to tell stories, construct myths and make sense of our place in the world. In doing so, the book illuminates a wide range of cultural and chronological settings whilst giving close attention to the mobility of people and things between, across, and through time and place.Is architecture an art, like literature or music? Or is it more akin to science or engineering? Can buildings be artworks, just like paintings and sculptures, or does their fundamentally functional nature mean they cannot be considered pure works of art?
Questions of architecture, art, and aesthetics do not allow for simple answers. But by asking such questions, we can usefully reveal the ways in which the concepts and meanings of architecture have changed over the centuries, and how they continue to change in the contemporary era. Is Architecture Art? explores the key conceptual questions about the aesthetic appreciation of architecture and its persistently contested status as an artform. It engages the work of thinkers ranging from Hume and Kant to Adorno, Tafuri, and Rancière, and draws on accessible and thought-provoking accounts of historical and contemporary architectural and art theory. Taking novel approaches to issues that will be familiar to the practising architect, it shows how aesthetics and art theory can open up and illuminate architectural theory, issue by issue. Is Architecture Art? will provoke discussion and debate among architects and architectural theorists, and force a new understanding of the purpose of architectural practice in the contemporary era as the concepts of 'art', 'the arts', and of the creative economy have shifted and blurred as never before.This is the first reference work to describe the history of embroidery throughout Scandinavia and Western Europe from the Bronze Age to the present day. It offers an authoritative guide to all the major embroidery traditions of the region and a detailed examination of the material, technical, artistic and design aspects of the subject, including its modern-day uses.
For millennia, the peoples of Scandinavia and Western Europe have been producing domestic and professional embroidery to decorate themselves, their families, clients, homes and public spaces. Embroidery is an expression of artistic, personal, family, regional and even political creativity which has played an important role in the social and cultural lives of people throughout this region. It has also reflected economic and political changes over time as well as social, religious and artistic contexts. With 76 chapters and 634 illustrations (554 in colour) of clothes, accessories and decorated soft furnishings (floor coverings, wall hangings, curtains, bed linen), this Encyclopedia is an invaluable resource for students and scholars of the subject. This volume is part of the Bloomsbury World Encyclopedia of Embroidery series. The first volume, on embroidery from the Arab World, won the 2017 Dartmouth Medal, awarded by the American Library Association for a reference work of outstanding quality and significance.Drawing on the fields of design history and the history of science, this book examines the important role that botanical science played in the emergence of Victorian design theory.
In early 19th-century Britain, a rapid influx of plants from other countries began to confuse the orders of classification. As these new specimens arrived in nurseries and conservatories, botanists revised and promoted a new taxonomy: the Natural System. In parallel, in 1835, British manufacturers faced a government inquiry in order to improve the output of the British design industry. They needed a nationally identifiable design aesthetic and the inquiry led to the creation of the Government Schools of Design and the Design Reform movement. This book explores how, whilst botanists used drawings to clarify new systems of plant classification, designers learnt 'art botany', the practice of basing decorative form and ornament on the hidden, natural laws that govern plant growth and structure. Design reformers used botany as a model for how to create and identify what is new and incorporate it into what was already familiar and meaningful, all within the purview of developing a professional field of practice. Sarah Alford provides a rich, interdisciplinary study of how the fields of design and botanical science came together. Through a framework of material culture, Alford sheds new light on the work of leading botanists, designers and illustrators such as Sarah Drake, John Lindley, Richard Redgrave, Owen Jones and Christopher Dresser. This book reveals how the designation of what design reformers deemed appropriate for the surface decoration of material structures as varied as carpets, jugs, wallpaper, and furniture, was an embrace of botanical science as a source of fantasy and imagination.By breaking down the study of type into a systematic progression of relationships-letter, word, sentence, paragraph, page, and screen-award-winning graphic designer and professor of communication design Denise Bosler provides a unique and illuminating perspective on typography, for both print and digital media, and for designers of all skill levels.
New to this edition:A detailed, step-by-step guide to successfully altering and repairing ready-made apparel that will help you achieve the perfect fit and extend the life of your clothing.
Whether you are interested in tailoring your wardrobe, starting a business, or learning a skill that will save you money and the planet, you'll find what you need through illustrated step-by-step projects and no-nonsense videos. You'll learn to make alterations to your ready-made clothing, including a variety of hemming techniques and taking in/ letting out seams, and repair methods to fix zippers, tears, and holes. There are also detailed guidelines on more complex techniques, including adjusting suit jacket sleeves, reshaping necklines and even fixing backpacks, tents and bags.This important new book argues that at the root of the contemporary crisis of climate, energy, food, inequality, and meaning is a certain core presupposition that structures the ways in which we live, think, act and design: the assumption of dualism, or the fundamental separateness of things.
The authors contend that the key to constructing livable worlds lies in the cultivation of ways of knowing and acting based on a profound awareness of the fundamental interdependence of everything that exists - what they refer to as relationality. This shift in paradigm is necessary for healing our bodies, ecosystems, cities, and the planet at large. The book follows two interwoven threads of argumentation: on the one hand, it explains and exemplifies the modes of operation and the dire consequences of non-relational living; on the other, it elucidates the nature of relationality and explores how it is embodied in transformative practices in multiple spheres of life. The authors provide an instructive account of the philosophical, scientific, social, and political sources of relational theory and action, with the aim of illuminating the transition from living within seemingly ineluctable 'toxic loops' of unrelational living (based on ontological dualism), to living within 'relational weaves' which we might co-create with multiple human and nonhuman others.Overcrowding, noise and air pollution, long commutes and lack of daylight can take a huge toll on the mental well-being of city-dwellers. With mental healthcare services under increasing pressure, could a better approach to urban design and planning provide a solution? The restrictions faced by city residents around the world during the COVID-19 pandemic has brought home just how much urban design can affect our mental health - and created an imperative to seize this opportunity.
Restorative Cities explores a new way of designing cities, one which places mental health and wellness at the forefront. Establishing a blueprint for urban design for mental health, it examines a range of strategies - from sensory architecture to place-making for creativity and community - and brings a genuinely evidence-based approach that will appeal to designers and planners, health practitioners and researchers alike - and provide compelling insights for anyone who cares about how our surroundings affect us. Written by a psychiatrist and public health specialist, and an environmental psychologist with extensive experience of architectural practice, this much-needed work will prompt debate and inspire built environment students and professionals to think more about the positive potential of their designs for mental well-being.In centuries past, sexual body-parts and same-sex desire were un-men--tionables de-barred from polite conver-sa-tion and printed discourse. Yet one scientific discipline-ana-to-my-had license to rep-re-sent and nar-rate the in-timate details of the human body-anus and genitals in-clud-ed. Figured with-in the frame of an anatomical plate, pre-sen-ta-tions of dissected bo-dies and body-parts were often soberly tech-ni-cal. But just as often mon-strous, provoca-tive, flirtatious, theatri-cal, beau-tiful, and even sensual. Queer Anatomies explores overlooked examples of erotic expression within 18th and 19th-century anatomical imagery. It uncovers the subtle eroticism of certain anatomical illustrations, and the queerness of the men who made, used and collected them.
As a foundational subject for physicians, surgeons and artists in 18th- and 19th-century Europe, anatomy was a privileged, male-dominated domain. Artistic and medical compe-tence depended on a deep knowledge of anatomy and offered cultural legitimacy, healing authority, and aesthetic discernment to those who practiced it. The anatomical image could serve as a virtual queer space, a private or shared closet, or a men's club. Serious anatomical subjects were charged with erotic, often homoerotic, undertones. Taking brilliant works by Gautier Dagoty, William Cheselden, and Joseph Maclise, and many others, Queer Anatomies assembles a lost archive of queer expression-115 illustra-tions, in full-colour reproduction-that range from images of nudes, dissected bodies, penises, vaginas, rectums, hands, faces, and skin, to scenes of male viewers gazing upon works of art governed by anatomical principles. Yet the men who produced and savored illustrated anatomies were reticent, closeted. Diving into these textual and represen-ta-tional spaces via essayistic reflection, Queer Anatomies decodes their words and images, even their silences. With a range of close readings and com-par-ison of key images, this book unearths the connections between medical history, connoisseur-ship, queer studies, and art history and the understudied relationship between anatomy and desire.Accompanying a major exhibition at The Museum at FIT, Latin American and Latinx Fashion Design Today: Moda Hoy! examines Latin American and Latinx fashion design from the past 20 years, asking What is Latin American fashion design in the 21st century?
The book seeks to explore the sociohistorical influences and cultural dynamics that have propelled the development of the unique sartorial bricolage that is Latin American and Latinx fashion. Through a series of themes and topics favored by contemporary designers - including Indigenous heritage, art, sustainable design, politics, gender, elegance, and popular culture - it highlights established designers with a strong international presence, such as Isabel Toledo, Carolina Herrera, Rick Owens, Oscar de la Renta, Carla Fernández, and Gabriela Hearst. Accompanied by regional brands and emerging talents, and case studies that take an in-depth look into specific designers, and beautifully illustrated in full color throughout, Latin American and Latinx Fashion Design Today is essential reading for fashion enthusiasts who have an overlapping interest in Latin American studies, and all who appreciate the history and visual culture of fashion and Latin America.