Fashion, Desire and Anxiety: Image and Morality in the Twentieth Century

by Rebecca Arnold

Book Overview

Drawing upon both contemporary visual and written sources, this book illuminates the role that fashion plays in reflecting and shaping attitudes toward display and adornment. As traditional cultural notions of what is admissible or acceptable have fragmented, fashion has been a key site for experimentation. At both the haute couture and street level, clothing enables identities to be visualized, confronting the spectator with contradictory messages...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0813529034
• ISBN13: 9780813529035
• Release Date: March 2001
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Length: 160 Pages
• Weight: 1.28 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 7.7" x 9.6"

Customer Reviews

Spectacular!

With quick-paced, beautiful prose, Arnold distills, illuminates, and reveals the violence and decay which has become the dominant theme of end of the Century high-fashion. Generously illustrated and neatly referenced, she examines how power is wielded through fashion; how fashion blurs and disguises; and, most importantly, how it gives expression to the desires and anxieties of a buying public overwhelmed by a kind of creeping brutality. Never losing sight of historical and cultural contexts, she nevertheless delights in making her point by the exquisite examination of a detail. In a word, remarkable!