Fashion And Modernity

This book tests the very definition of modernity and enhances our understanding of the role of fashion in the modern world. From top hats to locomotives, dresses to retail outlets, fashion is a prism through which modernity reflects and refracts. Breward and Evans bring together an organic collaboration of voices on this subject. The collection ranges from such topics as James Morrison (1789-1857), the Napoleon of Shopkeepers; to dress in the Stuart era; The Mannequin Parade, 1900-1925; and clothing the London actress (1860-1914). From the relationship between clothing and forensic sciences, to the play of performance, parasexuality, and the celebrity, Fashion and Modernity offers an enlightening look at fashion and the modern age.

Defining "modernity" as largely confined to consumer culture in the wake of industrialization, the contributors examine fashions' role in defining production and consumption. In nine sets of essays and responses, contributors describe how fashion produced identities as sharp producers and entrepreneurs, as mainstream servants of the public, and as rebels, how performing bodies defined modernity in seventeenth-century court masques, on stage in the persons of Victorian actresses and in the mannequin parades of the early twentieth century, and how processes of modernity were expressed by fashion in the concept of the "second skin," in assemblage fashion, and in entropy and emergence. Annotation ©2005 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Christopher Breward is Professor in Historical and Cultural Studies, London College of Fashion.

Caroline Evans is Reader in Fashion Studies at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design.