All publicity is good publicity? Perhaps not. In recent years, multiple local and global fashion brands have been called out for cultural appropriation, racism, misogyny, and even flirting with fascism. Understanding Fashion Scandals is the first book to explore this changing landscape of contemporary fashion through case studies showing how 'shock value' lost its currency. The book focuses on the changes since the late-1970s and early 1980s, when brands like Calvin Klein and Benetton first used controversy as a promotional tool to build their brand identity, to the contemporary industry where avoiding social media backlash is critical to survival. Analyzing the tactics brands including Burberry, Dior, Dolce & Gabbana and Prada adopt to avoid or mitigate scandals, Vänskä and Gurova map the fashion industry's journey towards cultural sustainability.

Is it ever acceptable to “borrow” culturally inspired ideas? Who has ownership over intangible culture? What role does power inequality play? These questions are often at the center of heated public debates around cultural appropriation, with new controversies breaking seemingly every day. Cultural Appropriation in Fashion and Entertainment offers a sociological perspective on the appropriation of race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, and religion embedded in clothing, textiles, jewelry, accessories, hairstyles and tattoos, as well as in entertainment, such as K-pop, Bhangra, and hip-hop. By providing a range of global perspectives on the adoption, adaptation, and application of both tangible and intangible cultural objects, Kawamura and de Jong help move the conversation beyond simply criticizing designers and creators to encourage nuanced discussion and raise awareness of diverse cultures in the creative industries.

Fashion is one of the most powerful industries in the world, accounting for 6% of global consumption and growing steadily. Since the 1980s and the birth of the neoliberal economy, it has emerged as the glittering face of capitalism, bringing together prestige, power and beauty and occupying a central place in media and consumer fantasies. Yet the fashion industry, which claims to offer highly desirable job opportunities, relies significantly on job instability, not just in outsourced garment production but at the very heart of its creative production of luxury. Based on an in-depth investigation involving stylists, models, designers, hairdressers, make-up artists, photographers and interns, anthropologist Giulia Mensitieri goes behind fashion's glamorous facade to explore the lived realities of working in the industry. This challenging book lays bare the working conditions of 'the most beautiful job in the world,' showing that exploitation isn't confined to sweatshops abroad or sexual harassment of models, but exists at the very heart of the powerful symbolic and economic centre of fashion.

The Psychology of Fashion offers an insightful introduction to the exciting and dynamic world of fashion in relation to human behaviour, from how clothing can affect our cognitive processes to the way retail environments manipulate consumer behaviour. The book explores how fashion design can impact healthy body image, how psychology can inform a more sustainable perspective on the production and disposal of clothing, and why we develop certain shopping behaviours. With fashion imagery ever present in the streets, press and media, The Psychology of Fashion shows how fashion and psychology can make a positive difference to our lives.

Mention the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the word scandal comes to mind. When it comes to recent history, the association is quite accurate; in 1989-90 congressional panels were investigating -abuses, favoritism, and mismanagement- at HUD; in 1954 HUD's predecessor, the Federal Housing Administration, was targeted by the FBI for involvement in fraudulent home-improvement schemes; in the 1970s HUD was scrutinized for lax lending standards, blatant overappraisals, and shoddy housing. In this ground-breaking volume, Irving Welfeld, a senior analyst with HUD, describes and explains these sensational episodes as well as a series of hidden blunders that have cost taxpayers billions of dollars. In this thorough, firsthand account, Welfeld provides not only soundly documented history, but analyses of events that arrive at different interpretations than Congress reached in its investigations. Throughout, his readings ask hard and probing questions: Where were the overseers--the media, Congress, the General Accounting Office, the Office of Management and Budget? To what extent is poor management the root cause of HUD's failures? Will tighter regulation help in keeping out corruption? After his comprehensive survey of the scene, Welfeld goes the final step and offers solutions: a set of programs that would minimize secrecy on the part of federal administrators and the temptation to abuse the public trust. Most importantly, the programs outlined here will enable HUD to more effectively fulfill its mission to see that there is decent affordable housing for all Americans. HUD Scandals will be of interest to scholars of public administration, political scientists, and analysts of housing issues.

What kinds of things do fashion and clothing say about us? What does it mean to wear Gap or Gaultier, Milletts or Moschino? Are there any real differences between Hip-Hop style and Punk anti-styles? In this fully revised and updated edition, Malcolm Barnard introduces fashion and clothing as ways of communicating and challenging class, gender, sexual and social identities. Drawing on a range of theoretical approaches from Barthes and Baudrillard to Marxist, psychoanalytic and feminist theory, Barnard addresses the ambivalent status of fashion in contemporary culture.

As the practice of fashion curation extends into commercial galleries, public and retail spaces, and even to the individual self, professional concepts of 'curating' are undergoing rapid change. Today, everyone is seemingly able to 'curate', but where does this leave the traditional understanding of curation as clothing collected and displayed in a museum? This thought-provoking volume explores the practice of fashion curating in the 21st century, bridging the gap between methods of display and notions of 'the curatorial' in fashion exhibitions, commercial settings, and the virtual world. From fashion's earliest forays into the museum to creative collaborations between luxury fashion brands and artists, this book challenges understandings of fashion curation by drawing on the palpably new spaces, places, and actors in today's curating scene. Exploring poetic and performative museum displays in venues such as the V&A, Somerset House, MoMu and the Royal Ontario Museum, alongside the ways that brands such as Dior, Chanel and Louis Vuitton have made use of 'the curatorial' in their own commercial strategies, Fashion Curating asks pressing questions about controversial funding and collaboration from the commercial fashion sector, and the limitations of producing exhibitions that are at the same time critical and popular. Bringing together approaches from fashion curators, designers and world-renowned academics, curation is positioned as a critical practice that opens up new ways of conceptualizing and theorizing fashion, challenging how we think and what we already know.