The Fashioned Body provides a wide-ranging and original overview of fashion and dress from an historical and sociological perspective. Where once fashion was seen as marginal, it has now entered into core economic discourse focused around ideas about ‘cultural’ and ‘creative’ work as a major driver of developed economies. With a new preface and new material on the evolving fashion industry, this second edition gives a clear summary of the theories surrounding the role and function of fashion in modern society. Entwistle examines how fashion plays a crucial role in the formation of modern identity through its articulation of the body, gender and sexuality. The book offers a much needed synthesis between the literature on fashion and dress, and the sociology of the body, offering an updated critique of the issues raised in the first edition. Entwistle shows how an understanding of fashion and dress requires an understanding of the meanings acquired by the body in culture since it is the body that fashion speaks to and which is dressed in almost all social situations and encounters. She argues that while fashion refers to a specific system of dress originating in the west, all cultures ‘dress’ the body in the same way, making it a crucial feature of social order. Drawing on the work of theorists, the book offers insights into the connections that need to be made between the body, fashion and dress. The Fashioned Body will be an invaluable resource for anyone interested in the social role of fashion and dress in modern culture.

In 1975 Laura Mulvey published her seminal essay on the male gaze, ushering in a new era in understanding the politics and theory of looking at the female body. Since then, feminist thinking has expanded upon and revised Mulvey's theory and much of the Western world has seen a resurgence in feminist activism as well as the rise of neoliberalism and shifts in digital culture and (self-)representation. For the first time, this book addresses what it means to look at the fashioned female body in this radical new landscape. In chapters exploring the fashioned body within contexts such as queerness, veiling, blackness, pregnancy, fatness, and criminality, Revisiting the Gaze addresses intersectional debates in feminism and re-evaluates the concept of the gaze in light of recent social and political changes. With an interdisciplinary approach, bridging fashion and fine art, this book opens the door to discussions about the male gaze and the fashioned body.

The Fashioned Body provides a wide-ranging and original overview of fashion and dress from an historical and sociological perspective. The book gives a clear summary of the theories surrounding the role and function of fashion in modern society, and examines how fashion plays a crucial role in the formation of modern identity through its articulation of the body, gender and sexuality. In examining fashion in relation to the body, the book offers a much needed synthesis between the literature on fashion and dress, which has tended to ignore the body, and the sociology of the body, which has tended to marginalize fashion and dress. Entwistle shows how an understanding of fashion and dress requires an understanding of the meanings acquired by the body in culture - since it is the body that fashion speaks to and which is dressed in almost all social situations and encounters. She argues that while fashion refers to a specific system of dress originating in the west, all cultures 'dress' the body in the same way, making it a crucial feature of social order. Drawing on the work of Douglas, Foucault, Merleau-Ponty, Goffman and Bourdieu, the book offers insights into the connections that need to be made between the body, fashion and dress, arguing for an account of fashion and dress as 'situated bodily practice'. The Fashioned Body will be an invaluable resource for students and academics interested in the social role of fashion and dress in modern culture and will also be of interest to students and researchers in the areas of consumption, cultural studies, gender studies and feminist theory.

Throughout history certain forms and styles of dress have been deemed appropriate - or more significantly, inappropriate - for people as they age. Older women in particular have long been subject to social pressure to tone down, to adopt self-effacing, covered-up styles. But increasingly there are signs of change, as older women aspire to younger, more mainstream, styles, and retailers realize the potential of the 'grey market'. Fashion and Age is the first study to systematically explore the links between clothing and age, drawing on fashion theory and cultural gerontology to examine the changing ways in which age is imagined, experienced and understood in modern culture through the medium of dress. Clothes lie between the body and its social expression, and the book explores the significance of embodiment in dress and in the cultural constitution of age. Drawing on the views of older women, journalists and fashion editors, and clothing designers and retailers, it aims to widen the agenda of fashion studies to encompass the everyday dress of the majority, shifting the debate about age away from its current preoccupation with dependency, towards a fuller account of the lived experience of age. Fashion and Age will be of great interest to students of fashion, material culture, sociology, sociology of age, history of dress and to clothing designers.

This book provides a concise and much-needed introduction to the sociology of fashion. Most studies of fashion do not make a clear distinction between clothing and fashion. Kawamura argues that clothing is a tangible material product whereas fashion is a symbolic cultural product. She debunks the myth of the genius designer and explains, provocatively, that fashion is not about clothes but is a belief. There is an institutional structure, ignored by many fashion theorists, that has shaped and produced the fashion phenomenon. Kawamura further shows how the structural nature of the fashion system works to legitimize designers creativity and can make them successful. Newer fashion cities, such as Milan and New York, are the product of the fashion system that originated in Paris. Without that systemic structure, fashion culture would not exist. Fashion-ology provides a big picture approach that focuses on the social process behind fashion and its perpetuation.

Shortlisted for the Millia Davenport Publication Award Experimental Fashion traces the proliferation of the grotesque and carnivalesque within contemporary fashion and the close relation between fashion and performance art, from Lady Gaga's raw meat dress to Leigh Bowery's performance style. The book examines the designers and performance artists at the turn of the twenty-first century whose work challenges established codes of what represents the fashionable body. These innovative people, the book argues, make their challenges through dynamic strategies of parody, humour and inversion. It explores the experimental work of modern designers such as Georgina Godley, Bernhard Willhelm, Rei Kawakubo and fashion designer, performance artist, and club figure Leigh Bowery. It also discusses the increased centrality of experimental fashion through the pop phenomenon, Lady Gaga.

The Fashioned Body provides a wide-ranging and original overview of fashion and dress from an historical and sociological perspective. Where once fashion was seen as marginal, it has now entered into core economic discourse focused around ideas about 'cultural' and 'creative' work as a major driver of developed economies. This third edition of The Fashioned Body, the most comprehensive revision to date, revisits the classic works on fashion, dress and the body, and introduces contemporary issues and debates in the area. With new sections and revisions to all chapters, the major updates pick up on recent debates on fashion from the perspective of decolonising the curriculum, diversity, queer studies, sustainability, the environment, and digital fashion. A newly expanded bibliography of contemporary studies of fashion and dress is also included. The book continues to show how an understanding of fashion and dress requires analysing the meanings and practices of the dressed body in culture. Moreover, its central premise – that fashion is a 'situated practice' articulated through everyday dressed bodies – has become established orthodoxy within fashion studies since publication of the first edition in 2000. Remaining a seminal text in the field, this book will be essential reading for anyone interested in the social role of fashion and dress in modern culture.