A fashion photograph is, simply, a photograph made specifically to show (or, in some cases, to allude to) clothing or accessories, usually with the intent of documenting or selling the fashion. Photographs of fashionable dress, in existence since the invention of photography in 1839, are not fashion photography. The distinguishing feature—and the common denominator in the enormous diversity of style, approach, and content—is the fashion photograph’s intent to convey fashion or a “fashionable” lifestyle. At the end of the twentieth century, the Calvin Klein advertisement featuring only Calvin’s portrait changed the very definition of a fashion photograph from a picture of the featured clothing to the selling of a glamorous lifestyle identified with a specific logo. Read the rest of this entry »
May 28th, 2010 in
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Fashion was first propelled onto the Internet (c. 1994) by what María Contreras refers to in Vogue España as that old refrain “adapt or die.” A decade into Web history, it has become clear the Internet is used for gathering information, communication, and entertainment. Rather than becoming a world, the Web has become an essential tool for living. Read the rest of this entry »
May 27th, 2010 in
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Clothing has been collected and exhibited by a variety of individuals and institutions. Already in the eighteenth century, Madame Tussaud of wax-museum fame, was acquiring and displaying the clothing of celebrities. Today, a wide variety of museums collect dress and textiles, including anthropological and ethnological museums, history museums, art museums, design museums, and specialized fashion and textile museums. Read the rest of this entry »
May 27th, 2010 in
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In the nineteenth century, the first living mannequins, or “manikins,” took their name from the static dummy or lay figure they were soon to replace as the principal form of display in the dressmaker’s salon. While the word “mannequin”—in French, le mannequin—described the woman, the word “model”— le modèle—designated the gown she exhibited in the salon. The model gown was a one-off that did not go into production; it was thus both an exclusive dress for sale to an individual client, and a prototype (hence the term model) sold to a fashion buyer for adaptation to the mass market. Both model gowns and model women were at the heart of the commercial development of the French couture industry and its global markets, and there was always some confusion in the terminology. The dual meaning of the word “model” also signals the ambivalent status of the earliest fashion models, hovering uneasily between subject- and object-hood. They invoked both admiration and disapproval, disconcerting their critics precisely because they wore fashionable dress in public for money rather than for its own sake. Read the rest of this entry »
May 27th, 2010 in
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The goal of fashion marketing and merchandising, for both manufacturers and retailers, is to sell merchandise at a profit. This requires careful planning and coordination. Read the rest of this entry »
May 27th, 2010 in
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Fashion magazines are an essential component of the fashion industry. They are the medium that conveys and promotes the design’s vision to the eventual purchaser. Balancing the priorities has led to the diversity of the modern periodical market. Read the rest of this entry »
May 27th, 2010 in
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Until Virginia Pope of the New York Times made fashion the topic of serious newspaper coverage with the attendant responsibilities for accuracy, objectivity, and fairness, the words “fashion journalism” were an oxymoron. Read the rest of this entry »
May 27th, 2010 in
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The fashion industry is unique from other fields of manufacturing in that it is ruled largely by the same intention as its end product: change. Read the rest of this entry »
May 27th, 2010 in
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Fashion illustration, although often considered quaint and recherché, cannot, in fact, be separated from the development of printing technologies and the growth of fashion journalism. Read the rest of this entry »
May 27th, 2010 in
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The term “fashion icon” has recently replaced the slightly antiquated notion of “fashion leaders.” During the second half of the twentieth century, fashion became less hierarchical, more meritocratic, and media-dominated. Indeed, the media itself created its own icons of style, while scrutinizing those proffered up by journalists, stylists, and others involved in the professional process of promoting fashion. The “trickle-down,” designer-led fashions of the past were joined by the concept of “bubble-up,” where fashions are created on the streets and fed upward through the fashion system. “Style is not fashion until it has reached the street,” is a statement popularly attributed to Coco Chanel, herself a leader; she was also part of the democratization of fashion. Read the rest of this entry »
May 27th, 2010 in
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The relationship between fashion and health is a complex one, with fashion sometimes being shaped by current beliefs about health and disease and, at other times, acting as the cause of illness. Read the rest of this entry »
May 27th, 2010 in
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Because the design and retailing of fashion is a global phenomenon, it should come as no surprise that learning institutions around the world prepare graduates for careers in the international fashion industry. Training ranges from vocational to creative to theoretical and results in certificates and diplomas (one to three years), which include associate (two years), baccalaureate (four years), master (master of arts, M.A.; master of fine arts, M.F.A.; and master of sciences, M.S.) and doctoral (doctor of philosophy, Ph.D.; doctor of education, Ed.D.; and doctor of art, D.A.) degrees. Read the rest of this entry »
May 27th, 2010 in
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The title “fashion editor” evokes images of fashionable women, those arbiters of style and taste, who pronounce and decree what’s new and what’s next. They’ve appeared on stage and screen— from the indecisive Liza Elliot of Lady in the Dark (“the circus cover or the Easter cover?”) to the very decisive Maggie Prescott of Funny Face (“Think pink!”). Read the rest of this entry »
May 27th, 2010 in
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“Fashion doll” must be considered a very loose term. Sometimes it is used to indicate decorative figures usually produced as a series. Many times they are attired in historical dress. Additionally, notable people dress these dolls for charitable purposes. But there are other candidates for the term as well. Read the rest of this entry »
May 27th, 2010 in
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A fashion designer is responsible for creating the specific look of individual garments—including a garment’s shape, color, fabric, trimmings, and other aspects of the whole. The fashion designer begins with an idea of how a garment should look, turns that idea into a design (such as a sketch), and specifies how that design should be made into an actual piece of clothing by other workers (from patternmakers to finishers). The category of fashion designer includes people at different levels of the fashion business, from well-known couturiers, to anonymous designers working for commercial ready-to-wear houses, to stylists who might make only small modifications in existing designs. Fashion designers hold a special place in the world. Their talent and vision not only play a major role in how people look, but they have also made important contributions to the cultural and social environment. Read the rest of this entry »
May 27th, 2010 in
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Identity is one of the most compelling and contentious concepts in the humanities and social sciences. Fashion becomes inextricably implicated in constructions and reconstructions of identity: how we represent the contradictions and ourselves in our everyday lives. Through appearance style (personal interpretations of, and resistances to, fashion), individuals announce who they are and who they hope to become. Moreover, they express who they do not want to be or become (Freitas et al., 1997). Appearance style is a metaphor for identity; it is a complex metaphor that includes physical features (for example, skin, bodily shape, hair texture) as well as clothing and grooming practices. Because the latter are especially susceptible to change, they are prone to fluctuating and fluid ways of understanding oneself in relation to others within the larger context of fashion change. Read the rest of this entry »
May 25th, 2010 in
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Throughout the twentieth century, clothing has been used by lesbians and gay men as a means of expressing self-identity and of signaling to one another. Read the rest of this entry »
May 25th, 2010 in
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Fashion advertisements have their own stylistic modes and spheres of production and consumption, involving the interrelationship of word and image among other things. Yet, technological and social changes in clothing and retailing, and the impact of class, gender, and race politics, also have to be taken into account. Early forms of fashion promotion that originated in the eighteenth century, for example, overlapped with the rise of urban culture and shopping and embraced diverse forms of promotion, some of which we might not strictly recognize today as advertising. In the first instance, the majority of retailers regarded the creation of an enticing shop façade and interior as sufficient means for attracting and establishing a suitable clientele. This would subsequently be complemented by the circulation of handbills and trade cards, and to a lesser extent by press advertising, all of which were used to reinforce the reputation of the shop in question rather than to publicize the sale of particular wares. In the London Evening Post for 24 April 1741, for example, the haberdasher John Stanton placed an advertisement, not to tell the public about the goods he sold but to inform them of a change of trading address. Otherwise, newspaper advertisements were occasionally used by large-scale retailers and manufacturers to promote both new and secondhand goods at fixed prices, and from the 1760s tailors also began to advertise different items of male and female clothing. The emphasis of such publicity was the printed word and the general format was the list, enumerating the items on offer and how much they cost. By contrast, more alluring pictorial representations of the latest fashions were available as engraved or etched plates, displayed for sale in print sellers’ windows and also incorporated into such volumes as Heidehhoffs Gallery of Fashion (1794 – 1802) and intermittently in magazines like the Lady’s Magazine. Read the rest of this entry »
May 25th, 2010 in
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Fashion involves change, novelty, and the context of time, place, and wearer. Blumer (1969) describes fashion influence as a process of “collective selection” whereby the formation of taste derives from a group of people responding collectively to the Zeitgeist or “spirit of the times.” The simultaneous introduction and display of many new styles, the selections made by the innovative consumer, and the notion of the expression of the spirit of the times provide impetus for fashion. Central to any definition of fashion is the relationship between the designed product and how it is distributed and consumed. Read the rest of this entry »
May 25th, 2010 in
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The earliest books on fashion history published in Europe date back to the Renaissance and the early modern period. Between 1520 and 1610, over two hundred books on dress were published in Germany, Italy, France, and Holland. These little books, designed for wealthy consumers, contained wood-engraved plates and minimal text, often in Latin and were focused on contemporary clothing. Curiosity about the foreign and the strange was as intense as ignorance was rife and publications contained fantasized images of the noble savage (the Peruvian, the Florida Indian, the African) set against plates of the fashionable clothes of European aristocracy and the dress of merchants, peasantry, and tradesmen. Between 1760 and 1820 interest in fashion and dress from wealthy consumers encouraged the publication of large folio-size costume books featuring hand-colored, etched copper plates and the new color printing technique of aquatint and, from the 1830s, lithography. Romanticism suffused all these luxury publications, with their emphasis on illustration with brief text, now no longer in Latin. Thomas Jefferys’s ambitious four volumes, Collection of the Dresses of Different Nations, Ancient and Modern (1757 and 1772), covered dress of the entire known world, including “Old English Dresse after the Designs of Holbein, Vandyke, Hollar and Others.” His view of women’s fashions was that they were simply “a Decoration of Beauty, and an encitement to Desire.” Read the rest of this entry »
May 25th, 2010 in
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While fashions in furniture and architecture have not generally been perceived as a problem, fashionable dress has been frequently criticized by clergy, philosophers, moralists, and academics for centuries. The condemnations have been numerous and varying; fashionable clothes are attacked for encouraging vanity, loose sexual morality, conspicuous consumption, and effeminacy (in men), and thus blamed for all manner of social breakdown and sexual and gender confusion. Further, the very idea of discarding clothes once they are no longer fashionable (rather than “worn out”) has been seen by some as wasteful, frivolous, and irrational. The reasons fashion has been singled out for such condemnation are important and illustrative of the way in which fashionable dress intersects with wider social debates concerning gender, class, and sexuality. Perhaps the problem has to do with the close relationship of dress to the body, which bears the weight of considerable social, moral, sexual pressure, and prohibition (see Barcan 2004 and Ribeiro 2003). Further, given the close cultural associations between a woman’s identity and her body, it is no surprise that fashion is subjected to such an onslaught of criticism: As feminists have argued, the things associated with women are likely to carry a lower social status than the things of men. This is not to say that men are exempt from criticisms concerning fashionable dress (indeed, they sometimes are), but such criticisms are less frequent in history and when they occur, it is the inappropriate nature of male interest in clothes, and fears about masculinity, that prompt such attacks. Read the rest of this entry »
May 25th, 2010 in
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According to the editorial policy of Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture, fashion is defined as “the cultural construction of the embodied identity.” As such, it encompasses all forms of self-fashioning, including street styles, as well as so-called high fashion created by designers and couturiers. Fashion also alludes to the way in which things are made; to fashion something is to make it in a particular form. Most commonly, fashion is defined as the prevailing style of dress or behavior at any given time, with the strong implication that fashion is characterized by change. As Shakespeare wrote, “The fashion wears out more apparel than the man.” There are fashions in furniture, automobiles and other objects, as well as in clothing, although greater attention is paid to sartorial fashion, probably because clothing has such an intimate relationship with the physical body and, by extension, the personal identity of the individual. Read the rest of this entry »
May 25th, 2010 in
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Already in the decade preceding the Third Reich, female fashion had become a locus of contentious debate in Germany. In reaction to the “Garçonne” style that had become popular in the post-World War I years, conservative critics railed against “degenerate” cosmetics and clothing, which they described as “jewified,” “masculinized,” “French-dominated,” and “poisonous.” They also castigated the trend mongers who pushed such tasteless, unbecoming fashions onto unsuspecting female consumers. Short hair, shorter hemlines, pants, and visible makeup—all of these were purportedly causing the moral degradation of German women. Read the rest of this entry »
May 25th, 2010 in
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Though already used for many centuries in other parts of the world, fans started becoming popular in Europe in the late sixteenth century, but experienced virtual demise in the early twentieth century. Read the rest of this entry »
May 25th, 2010 in
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Celebrating festivals by wearing masks and disguises has been customary in Europe for many centuries. The eighteenth-century masquerade, forerunner of the fancy dress balls and parties of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, owes its origin to the Venetian pre-Lent Carnival, developed in the seventeenth century. This was a public, open-air event in which all classes participated in dancing, feasting, and practical jokes. The revelers wore masks and either fanciful decorative costumes or all-concealing dark cloaks called dominoes, to enjoy flirtations and intrigue incognito. Read the rest of this entry »
May 24th, 2010 in
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Here today, gone tomorrow. It is hard to identify a fad until it has fizzled. Fashion cycles, more generally, vary in speed; fads are those particular fashion cycles that “take us by surprise, but also fade very quickly” (van Ginneken, p. 161). The term “fashion” implies “strong norms” (Crane, p. 1), and although this criterion may also apply to fads, these norms are of shorter duration and within a more limited population. Fred Davis goes so far as to say that fashion itself “somehow manage[s] on first viewing to startle, captivate, offend,” but ultimately “engage[s] the sensibilities of some culturally preponderant public, in America the so-called middle mass” (p. 15). By implication, a fad represents a temporary and limited divergence from a more general path of fashionability; the “so-called middle mass” may never approve. Read the rest of this entry »
May 24th, 2010 in
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The term “eyeglasses” is used to indicate lenses that are held up to or worn before the eyes, either as an aid to vision or as a fashion accessory. This term formerly encompassed a wide variety of single and double lenses and kinds of frames; in modern American usage, it is taken to mean spectacles (the term more commonly used in the United Kingdom). Originally a practical vision aid, eyeglasses have at various times in their history served as such fashionable symbols of status, learning, and other desirable qualities that they have even been worn by those with perfect vision. Although their form has been influenced by fashion throughout their history, not until the twentieth century did they truly evolve from a practical necessity into a fashion accessory in their own right, becoming a vehicle for design, individual expression, and enhancement of personal appearance. Read the rest of this entry »
May 21st, 2010 in
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In any single culture, the definition of what constitutes an extreme fashion may be agreed upon; but extreme fashion, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. Particularly between Western and non-Western views there are very different ideas of what is excessive or outlandish, or verging on the unacceptable. Read the rest of this entry »
May 21st, 2010 in
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Simply put, evening dress is the prevailing style prescribed by fashion to be worn in the evening. Though straightforward in its basic definition, there are surprisingly complex expectations related to appropriateness of fashionable dress for evening. Regardless of the era, evening dress is intricately connected to fashions of the day, with specific characteristics that distinguishes it from everyday dress. An evening gown is a special form of dress that amplifies a woman’s femininity and often proclaims her desirability. In general, necklines are low, bodices are tightly fitted, arms are bared, and skirts are extravagantly designed. Fabric surfaces vary from reflective to matte, textured to smooth, and soft to rigid. Gowns may be bouffant or hug the body, emphasizing every curve and swell. Regardless of these distinctions, there tends to be an overall emphasis on the woman’s body and in many instances on the gown itself. Through the decades, undergarments have played a critical role in reshaping the body into the desired silhouette, from corsets and petticoats of the nineteenth century to control-top panty hose and padded Wonderbras of the twenty-first century. Read the rest of this entry »
May 21st, 2010 in
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For historians, the naming in 395 C.E. of two consuls, or emperors—one for the Eastern and one for the Western parts of Europe—marks the end of the Roman Empire. As the Western empire gradually fell under barbarian control, the empire in the East (its capital in Constantinople) flourished. Dress in Byzantium was an amalgam of Roman and Eastern styles. From the East came elaborate ornaments, decorative motifs, and textiles—especially those of silk. The result was extensive use of embroidery, appliqué, precious stones, or woven designs added to the long or short tunics and some of the draped outer garments characteristic of Roman dress. Read the rest of this entry »
May 21st, 2010 in
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