Fifty Years of Fashion: New Look to Now
by Valerie Steele
68 Members (3.50)
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Valerie Steele begins by discussing the impact of the Second World War on the international fashion system, explaining, for example, how the success of Christian Dior's "New Look" was the result of sweeping social and economic changes that included a shift from the atelier to the global corporate conglomerate. In the 1950s, Steele argues, developments in the world of fashion were influenced by sexual politics and the anxieties associated with the Cold War: social conformity and gender show more stereotypes led to such phenomena as "wife dressing" and "the man in the gray flannel suit." Steele traces the fashion revolution of the 1960s, which smashed both social and sartorial rules as "swinging London" inaugurated its own new dictatorship of youth. She describes the rise of the women's movement and the hippies' anti-fashion sentiment, which ushered in a new freedom of choice in the 1970s, "the decade that taste forgot." She finds that the 1980s, often described as "the decade of greed," was actually a more complicated period, during which Calvin Klein jeans as well as suits by Armani became notorious yuppie status symbols. And she shows that the fashions of the 1990s, emphatically postmodernist, have repeatedly returned to the themes of retro, ethno, and techno styles. show lessTags
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Author Information
78+ Works 1,717 Members
Valerie Steele is chief curator and acting director, The Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology, State University of New York. She is founder and editor of Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body and Culture. (Bowker Author Biography)
Classifications
- Genres
- Nonfiction, Art & Design, History, General Nonfiction
- DDC/MDS
- 391.00973 — Society, government, & culture Customs, etiquette & folklore Costume and personal appearance Standard subdivisions History, geographic treatment, biography North America United States
- LCC
- GT615 .S74 — Geography, Anthropology and Recreation Manners and customs (General) Manners and customs (General) Costume. Dress. Fashion
- BISAC
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- Members
- 68
- Popularity
- 460,911
- Rating
- (3.50)
- Languages
- English, Italian
- Media
- Paper
- ISBNs
- 2
