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

by Rebecca Arnold

Book Overview

Fashion, and the glossy magazines it inhabits, allow Western culture to dream. It permits a person to fantasize and to experiment with new identities. It flaunts glamour and success. Appearance... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• 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!