Fashion Merchandising and Design Subject Guide

Essays on the politics of everyday style.

Over the last four decades, the fashion modeling industry has become a lightning rod for debates about Western beauty ideals, the sexual objectification of women, and consumer desire. Both a vividly illustrated historical survey and an incisive critique of fashion media, This Year's Model demonstrates the lasting cultural influence of this unique form of embodied labor.

This book demonstrates how dress shapes and is shaped by social processes and phenomena such as beauty, time, the body, the gift exchange, class, gender and religion.

There is a chapter titled "The Body" and "Gender and Sexuality."

The Visible Self presents a systematic approach to analyzing daily rituals that we all share-not simply the act of putting on clothing, but also the method of cleansing the body and adorning it. Using Western and non-Western examples, the authors take a three-pronged approach to understanding dress across cultures, uncovering its relationship to human beings as biological, aesthetic, and social beings.

There is a chapter titled "Looking Good
Feeling Right – Aesthetics of the Self."

There is a chapter titled "Dress Freedom: The Personal and the Political."

Chapter titled "Dressing for Success: The Re-Suiting of Corporate America in the 1970s."

There is a chapter titled "Resistances and Reconciliations: Women and Body Art."

Interesting chapter titled "Emotional Effects of Social Media on Fashion: Calling-out and Canceling."

This book tackles the charged and frequently painful subject of how appearance affects social interaction and the role of larger social structures in perpetuating and institutionalizing it as an evaluative criterion.