Fashion

273 Pages·2003·15.986 MB·English

by  Christopher Breward

Fashion
Oxford History ofArt
Christopher Breward is currently Professor in Society. He sits on the editorial board of the
Historical and Cultural Studies at London international research journal Fashion Theory
College of Fashion, The London Institute, and has contributed to the Journal of Design
where he directs postgraduate research in the History,Parallax,Gender and History, and
field of fashion studies. He has taught art and New Formations. His publications include The
design history at Manchester Metropolitan Culture of Fashion(Manchester University
University and the Royal College of Art, Press 1995),The Hidden Consumer
London, and has lectured widely in Great (Manchester University Press 1999), and co-
Britain, the United States, and Europe. He edited collections Material Memories (Berg
has also served on the executive committee of 1999) and The Englishness of English Dress
the Design History Society and the Costume (Berg2002).
Oxford History of Art
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Imperial Rome and WORLD ART Latin American Art
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Aegean Art and WESTERN DESIGN
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Art in Renaissance Italy Peter Garlake
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Fashion
Susie Nash Contemporary African Art
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OOxxffoorrdd HHiissttoorryy ooffAArrtt
Fashion
Christopher Breward
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© Christopher Breward 2003
First published 2003by Oxford University Press
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Picture research by Charlotte Morris and Elisabeth Agate
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Contents
Acknowledgements 7
Introduction 9
Part 1 The Production of Fashion 19
Chapter 1 The Rise of the Designer 21
Chapter 2 Making Clothes 49
Chapter 3 Innovating Change 63
Part 2 The Promotion of Fashion 99
Chapter 4 Disseminating Desire 101
Chapter 5 Fashion on the Page 115
Chapter 6 Fashion and Film 131
Chapter 7 Shopping for Style 143
Part 3 The Wearing of Fashion 157
Chapter 8 Style and Modernity 159
Chapter 9 Fashion Capitals 169
5
Chapter 10 Fashion and Identity 217
Notes 241
Further Reading 249
Timeline 256
Museums and Websites 261
List of Illustrations 265
Index 269
6
Acknowledgements
With thanks to the friends who have read and commented on drafts
ofthis book, especially Caroline Evans, Pamela Church Gibson, and
Adam Briggs at The London Institute, and Katharine Reeve, Char-
lotte Morris, David Williams, and their colleagues at OUP and The
Running Head. I would also like to thank the students who have
inspired its content, especially Paola De Giovanni Pastore for her assis-
tance in the early stages of picture research.
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Introduction
Fashion now occupies the centre ground in popular understandings of
modern culture. It enjoys unprecedented coverage in the western
media and defines the tenor of urban life like no other visual medium.
Such is its relevance that in the normally conservative world of aca-
demia it has recently attracted the attentions of a specialist refereed
journal.1This growing sense of respectability has run in tandem with
the publication of a variety of ground-breaking texts that have aimed,
over the past fifteen years or more, to place the study of fashion along-
side other popular phenomena including theatre, journalism, advert-
ising, and film, recognizing its potential as a significant cultural force.
Fashion has been positioned in this literature as an important con-
duit for the expression of social identity, political ideas, and aesthetic
taste, and this model of interpretation has arguably influenced a re-
evaluation of all creative practices, including art.2Such analysis is not
new. Indeed, from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century
the system of fashion was regularly cited by radicals and revolutionaries
as a cultural model worthy of closer examination—as a paradigm, in
fact, of modernity itself.3What is fresh is the way in which fashion has
at last begun to generate a critical literature that it can properly call its
own.
Informed by the concerns of anthropology, psychology, linguistics,
sociology, and cultural studies, this new body of work complements
those specialized studies of aspects of fashion culture that have been
completed within the fields of social, cultural, and economic history.4
These works have tended to concentrate on the creation of fashionable
western dress between the fourteenth and nineteenth centuries, seeing
in the study of clothing a useful framework for analysing trends in the
manufacture, distribution, and use of commodities in historical com-
munities. Though, for the lay reader, the published output of such
research may appear to be parochial in its scope and tentative in its
findings, its very existence points to a profound shift in attitude
amongst historians whose profession has not always been so open to
suggestion and change. It seems that the rising prominence of fashion
in both popular and academic arenas must bear some responsibility for,
Detail of 3 and take succour from, the effects of the much touted ‘cultural turn’
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