Fashion Merchandising and Design Subject Guide

This interdisciplinary work brings a new perspective to the diverse and colorful global history of human attire from prehistoric times to modern day. It illuminates dress as a reflection of social status, aesthetic trends, economic conditions, cultural exchange, and modern media marketing, covering the evolution of clothing styles in diverse historical periods, regions, and countries, as well as the diversification of materials, production methods, and commerce.

In 500 entries, detailed information about clothing, hairstyles, tattoos, jewelry, body piercing, feet binding, and other types of fashion or style is examined. Additionally, entries explain the fashion or style within the context of the traditions, customs, rituals, or practices it relates to, as well as its significance to society or culture.

A team of anthropologists and social scientists have taken a close look at more than 200 countries to document the myriad ways in which culture -- every bit as much as geographic borders -- defines and separates the nations of the world. Using a standard entry format for easy comparison, each country's shared values, behaviors and cultural variations are surveyed -- from foods and rituals to pastimes and arts. Lavishly illustrated with more than 1,000 photographs and more than 200 maps.

Entry on clothing and fashion.

Everywhere in the world there is a close connection between the clothes we wear and our political expression. To date, few scholars have explored what clothing means in 20th-century Africa and the diaspora. In Fashioning Africa, an international group of anthropologists, historians, and art historians bring rich and diverse perspectives to this fascinating topic.

From the civil rights and Black Power era of the 1960s through antiapartheid activism in the 1980s and beyond, black women have used their clothing, hair, and style not simply as a fashion statement but as a powerful tool of resistance. Whether using stiletto heels as weapons to protect against police attacks or incorporating African-themed designs into everyday wear, these fashion-forward women celebrated their identities and pushed for equality.

This book is a study of how African slave and freed women used their fashion and style of dressing as a symbol of resistance to slavery and accommodation to white culture in pre and post-emancipation society.

This unique ethnographic investigation examines the role that fashion plays in the production of the contemporary Indian luxury aesthetic. Tracking luxury Indian fashion from its production in village craft workshops via upmarket design studios to fashion, Kuldova investigates the Indian luxury fashion market's dependence on the production of thousands of artisans all over India, revealing a complex system of hierarchies and exploitation.

Drawing on new research on textile trade and production in the regions that depended on the Indian Ocean, the book contributes to a new understanding of the role that Indian cloth played in the making of the modern world economy.

In today's globally connected marketplace, a wedding sari in rural north India may become a woman's blouse or cushion cover in a Western boutique. Lucy Norris's anthropological study of the recycling of clothes in Delhi follows garments as they are gifted, worn, handed on, discarded, recycled, and sold once more.

This intriguing book engages with the concept of the body in its cultural context by acknowledging and demonstrating that the human body is understood differently in Western and Indian cultures.

Essays on the politics of everyday style with a global scope.

The clothes we wear tell stories about us--and are often imbued with cultural meanings specific to our ethnic heritage. This concise A-to-Z encyclopedia explores 150 different and distinct items of ethnic dress, their history, and their cultural significance within the United States.

Recent interest in 'vintage' and second hand clothes by both fashion consumers and designers is only the latest manifestation of a long and complex cultural history of wearing and trading second hand clothes. With its origins in necessity, the passing of clothes between social and economic groups is now a global business, but with roots that are centuries old. Historical perspectives include studies located in Renaissance Florence, early industrial England, colonial Australia, and mid twentieth-century Ireland. The global nature of the second hand trade in clothing is presented through original research from Zambia, India, the Philippines, Hong Kong, and Japan.

Challenging the traditional silhouettes of their day, fashion designers such as Madeleine Vionnet and Cristóbal Balenciaga began to liberate the female body from the close-fitting hourglass forms which dominated European and American fashion, instead enveloping bodies in more autonomous garments which often took inspiration from beyond the West. As the century progressed, new generations of avant-garde designers from Rei Kawakubo to Martin Margiela further developed the ideas instigated by their predecessors to defy established notions of femininity in dress, creating space between body and garment.

The contributors in this book investigate the politics of fashion from a variety of perspectives, addressing theoretical as well as empirical issues, establishing the critical study of fashion and its protagonists as a central contribution to the aesthetic turn in international politics.   

Chapter on clothing of court life in eleventh century Japan.

Changes in the global economy have real and contradictory outcomes for the everyday lives of women workers. In 2001, Nancy Plankey-Videla had a rare opportunity to witness these effects firsthand. Having secured access to one of Latin America's top producers of high-end men's suits in Mexico for participant-observer research, she labored as a machine operator for nine months on a shop floor made up, mostly, of women. The firm had recently transformed itself from traditional assembly techniques, to lean, cutting-edge, Japanese-style production methods.

Chapter 7 is titled: Power, Sex, Hair, and Clothes

Describes the clothing of pre-Hispanic Middle American Indians.

Molas, the distinctive blouses made and worn by Kuna women in Panama, are collected by thousands of enthusiasts as well as by anthropological museums all over the world. They are recognized everywhere as an identifier of the Kuna people and also of Panama. This book, based on original research, explores the origin of the mola in the early twentieth century, how it became part of the everyday dress of Kuna women, and its role in creating Kuna identity.

Wearing Culture connects scholars of divergent geographical areas and academic fields--from archaeologists and anthropologists to art historians--to show the significance of articles of regalia and of dressing and ornamenting people and objects among the Formative period cultures of ancient Mesoamerica and Central America.