This illustrated survey of 600 years of fashion investigates its cultural and social meaning from medieval Europe to twentieth-century America. Breward's work provides the reader with a clear guide to the changes in style and taste and shows that clothes have always played a pivotal role in defining a sense of identity and society, especially when concerned with sexual and body politics.

How do different artistic and cultural practices develop in the contemporary consumer culture? Providing a new direction in cultural studies as well as a vigorous defence of the field, Angela McRobbie's new collection of essays considers the social consequences of cultural proliferation and the social basis of aesthetic innovation. In the wake of postmodernism, McRobbie offers a more grounded and even localised account of key cultural practices, from the new populism of young British artists, including Damien Hirst and Tracy Emin, to the underground London sounds of drum'n'bass, discussing music by artists such as Tricky, Talvin Singh and Goldie; from the new sexualities in girls' and women's magazines like More! and Sugar to the dynamics of fashion production and consumption. Throughout the essays the author returns to issues of livelihoods and earning a living in the cultural economy, while at the same time pressing the issue of cultural value.

"Messages, Signs, and Meanings can be used directly in introductory courses in semiotics, communications, media, or culture studies. Additionally, it can be used as a complementary or supplementary text in courses dealing with cognate areas of investigation (psychology, mythology, education, literary studies, anthropology, linguistics). The text builds upon what readers already know intuitively about signs, and then leads them to think critically about the world in which they live - a world saturated with images of all kinds that a basic knowledge of semiotics can help filter and deconstruct. The text also provides opportunities for readers to do "hands-on" semiotics through the exercises and questions for discussion that accompany each chapter. Biographical sketches of the major figures in the field are also included, as is a convenient glossary of technical terms." "The overall plan of the book is to illustrate how message-making and meaning-making can be studied from the specific vantage point of the discipline of semiotics. This third edition also includes updated discussions of information technology throughout, focusing especially on how meanings are now negotiated through such channels as websites, chat rooms, and instant messages."--Jacket.

How do fashion designers design? How does design function within the industry? How can design practices open up sustainable pathways for fashion's future? Designing Fashion's Future responds to these questions to offer a fresh understanding of design practices within the sprawling, shifting fashion system. Fashion design is typically viewed as the rarefied practice of elite professionals, or else as a single stage within the apparel value chain. Alice Payne shows how design needn't be reduced to a set of decisions by a designer or design team, but can instead be examined as a process, object, or agent that shapes fashion's material and symbolic worlds. Designing Fashion's Future draws on more than 50 interviews with industry professionals based in Australia, Asia, North America, Europe, and the United Kingdom. These diverse perspectives from multinational retailers, independent and experimental contexts ground the discussion in contemporary industry practices.

The subjects of the essays in this book range from looking at the ever changing means of specific garments and clothing practices of subcultural groups to examining dress as a reflection of changing life styles in American culture. The essays also examine fashions, fads, and popular images. Dress and Popular Culture hopes to shed new light on popular culture through a study of the associations of dress to culture.

This book links the leading innovators of modernism to the cult of the modern expert. In historicizing modernism as a distinct mode of knowledge that competes with other forms of expertise from law to psychology, Lois Cucullu shows how three modernist experts - Woolf, Forster, and Joyce - used technical innovations in the novel to replace reigning Victorian beliefs about marriage, procreation and the family. Modernist narratives of consciousness and bodies convert the gendered domestic sphere into an aesthetic one that grants cultural reproduction and a modern cultural class the centrality once accorded biological reproduction and the bourgeois household.