Fashion, Desire and Anxiety: Image and Morality in the Twentieth Century
by Rebecca Arnold
35 Members (4.50)
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Description
"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 becomes something to be perfected and admired." "These dreams and freedoms, Rebecca Arnold proposes, are contradictory. Fashion and its surrounding imagery elicit fear and anxiety in their consumers as well as pleasure. Fashion has come to incorporate the underside of modern life, with violence and show more decay becoming a dominant theme in clothing design and photography." "Arnold draws on diverse written sources to explore the complex nature of modern fashion. She discusses a range of key themes: how fashion uses and abuses the power of wealth; the alienating promotion of "good" taste; the power plays of sex and display; and how identities can be blurred to disguise and confuse. In order to unravel the contradictory emotions of desire and anxiety they provoke, she never loses sight of the historical and cultural contexts in which fashion designers and photographers perform."--Jacket. show lessTags
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Author Information
10 Works 194 Members
Rebecca Arnold is Research Fellow in the History of Design Department at the Royal College of Art in London
Classifications
- Genres
- Nonfiction, Art & Design, History
- DDC/MDS
- 391.00904 — Society, government, & culture Customs, etiquette & folklore Costume and personal appearance Standard subdivisions History, geographic treatment, biography
- LCC
- GT525 .A75 — Geography, Anthropology and Recreation Manners and customs (General) Manners and customs (General) Costume. Dress. Fashion
- BISAC
Statistics
- Members
- 35
- Popularity
- 815,883
- Rating
- (4.50)
- Languages
- English
- Media
- Paper, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 6
- ASINs
- 1
