Fashion travels. Every new shape of sleeve, each novel method of cutting and any innovation in fabric has spread through complex networks of makers, retailers and consumers. Disseminating Dress represents the first historical study of how these networks of fashion communication functioned and evolved in an increasingly global material world. Focussing on Britain – separated from mainland Europe, yet increasingly globally-linked – this volume will trace how dress was disseminated in and out of one island nation. The paths made by print, image and commodities around the globe have enabled historians to reimagine a connected material world. The influence of innovations in dissemination shape this volume, which asks urgent questions about the extent of global influence on fashion, and the intertwining nature of written, printed, visual and material fashion news. This collection brings together innovative scholarship from an interdisciplinary group of historians, art historians and fashion scholars to consider how global and local networks of dress dissemination converged to shape fashionable dress in Britain, and how British methods and aesthetics spread outwards across the world. From the drawing rooms of 19th-century London, to the verandas of 19th-century Australia, contributors to Disseminating Dress develop narratives of commodity and knowledge exchange to consider how fashion circulated.

Everywhere around the world, people make daily decisions about what to wear or how to dress. The Visible Self, 3rd Edition, presents a systematic approach to analyzing daily rituals that we all share—not simply the act of putting on clothing, but also the method of cleansing the body and adorning it. Using Western and non-Western examples, the authors take a three-pronged approach to understanding dress across cultures, uncovering its relationship to human beings as biological, aesthetic, and social animals. Readings collected from classic books and academic journals enable students to appreciate the complexity of dress from a multidisciplinary perspective that includes anthropology, sociology, economics, fine arts, and the natural sciences.