If dresses could talk, what stories might they tell? This compelling collection of short stories, essays, and poems features dress as the structural grounding for autobiographical accounts from women's lives in Western society. Often personal in nature, these «dress stories» point unfailingly to matters of social and cultural import. Some of the dresses described inhabit the popular imagination: the little girl dress, the communion dress, the school uniform, the prom dress, the wedding dress, the little black dress, and the burial dress. Beyond the semiotic, tactile, and visual aspects of the dresses themselves, the narratives delve into what dresses reveal about fundamental aspects of human experience: identity, embodiment, relationship, and mortality. Bought or made, then worn, forgotten, remembered, re-constructed, and re-interpreted, each dress offers a new glimpse into how we construct meaning in our daily lives, and how dresses serve to reinforce or resist social structures and cultural expectations.

African Fashion, Global Style provides a lively look at fashion, international networks of style, material culture, and the world of African aesthetic expression. Victoria L. Rovine introduces fashion designers whose work reflects African histories and cultures both conceptually and stylistically, and demonstrates that dress styles associated with indigenous cultures may have all the hallmarks of high fashion. Taking readers into the complexities of influence and inspiration manifested through fashion, this book highlights the visually appealing, widely accessible, and highly adaptable styles of African dress that flourish on the global fashion market.

A lively and innovative collection of new and recent writings on the cultural contexts of textiles The study of textile culture is a dynamic field of scholarship which spans disciplines and crosses traditional academic boundaries. A Companion to Textile Culture is an expertly curated compendium of new scholarship on both the historical and contemporary cultural dimensions of textiles, bringing together the work of an interdisciplinary team of recognized experts in the field. The Companion provides an expansive examination of textiles within the broader area of visual and material culture, and addresses key issues central to the contemporary study of the subject. A wide range of methodological and theoretical approaches to the subject are explored—technological, anthropological, philosophical, and psychoanalytical, amongst others—and developments that have influenced academic writing about textiles over the past decade are discussed in detail. Uniquely, the text embraces archaeological textiles from the first millennium AD as well as contemporary art and performance work that is still ongoing. This authoritative volume: Offers a balanced presentation of writings from academics, artists, and curators Presents writings from disciplines including histories of art and design, world history, anthropology, archaeology, and literary studies Covers an exceptionally broad chronological and geographical range Provides diverse global, transnational, and narrative perspectives Included numerous images throughout the text to illustrate key concepts A Companion to Textile Culture is an essential resource for undergraduate and postgraduate students, instructors, and researchers of textile history, contemporary textiles, art and design, visual and material culture, textile crafts, and museology.

Museum Objects provides a set of readings that together create a distinctive emphasis and perspective on the objects which lie at the heart of interpretive practice in museums, material culture studies and everyday life. This reader brings together classic and up to date texts on the nature and definition of the object itself, the senses and embodied experience of objects. No other volume brings together such perspectives in this way, and no other volume includes such a focus on the museum context. Museum Objects incorporates both theorised and more practical readings from a range of international academic and contextual perspectives. The overall result is a definitive set of readings that offers a comprehensive understanding of objects and their place within the museum context.

Modern Fashion Traditions questions the dynamics of fashion systems and spaces of consumption outside the West. Too often, these fashion systems are studied as a mere and recent result of globalization and Western fashion influences, but this book draws on a wide range of non-Western case studies and analyses their similarities and differences as legitimate fashion systems, contesting Eurocentric notions of tradition and modernity, continuity versus change, and 'the West versus the Rest'. Preconceptions about non-Western fashion are challenged through diverse case studies from international scholars, including street-style identity in Bhutan, the influence of Ottoman cultural heritage on contemporary Turkish fashion design, and an investigation into the origins of the word 'fashion' in Chinese. Negotiating tradition, foreign influences and the contemporary global dominance of Western fashion cities, Modern Fashion Traditions will give readers a clearer understanding of non-Western fashion identities in the present. Accessibly written, this ground-breaking text makes an essential contribution to the study of non-Western fashion and will be an important resource for students of fashion history and theory, anthropology, and cultural studies.

This book examines contemporary feminist visual activism(s) through the lens of embodiment(s). The contributors explore how the arts articulate and engage with the current sense of crisis and political concerns (e.g. equality, decolonisation, social justice, democracy, precarity, vulnerability), negotiated with and through the body. Drawing upon the legacy of feminist art historical critique, the book scrutinises activist strategies, practices and resilience techniques in intersectional and transnational frameworks. It interrogates how the arts enable the creation of civil and political resilience, become engaged with politics as a response to disaster capitalism and attempt to reform and improve society. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, visual culture, fine arts, women’s studies, gender studies, feminism and cultural studies.

Creating African Fashion Histories examines the stark disjuncture between African self-fashioning and museum practices. Conventionally, African clothing, textiles, and body adornments were classified by museums as examples of trade goods, art, and ethnographic materials—never as "fashion." Counterposing the dynamism of African fashion with museums' historic holdings thus provides a unique way of confronting ways in which coloniality persists in knowledge and institutions today. This volume brings together an interdisciplinary group of scholars and curators to debate sources and approaches for constructing African fashion histories and to examine their potential for decolonizing museums, fashion studies, and global cultural history. The editors of this volume seek to answer questions such as: How can researchers use museum collections to reveal traces of past self-fashioning that are obscured by racialized forms of knowledge and institutional practice? How can archival, visual, oral, ethnographic, and online sources be deployed to capture the diversity of African sartorial pasts? How can scholars and curators decolonize the Eurocentric frames of thinking encapsulated in historic collections and current curricula? Can new collections of African fashion decolonize museum practice? From Moroccan fashion bloggers to upmarket Lagos designers, the voices in this ground-breaking collection reveal fascinating histories and geographies of circulation within and beyond the continent and its diasporic communities.