Uniforms are perhaps the most widely worn garments in the world. Craik looks at the meaning of uniforms as well as how they have influenced fashion, and shows the centrality of uniforms to cultural politics. She draws on historical and contemporary examples of uniforms across different cultures.

Uniform: Clothing and Discipline in the Modern World examines the role uniform plays in public life and private experience. This volume explores the social, political, economic, and cultural significance of various kinds of uniforms to consider how they embody gender, class, sexuality, race, nationality, and belief. From the pageantry of uniformed citizens to the rationalizing of time and labour, this category of dress has enabled distinct forms of social organization, sometimes repressive, sometimes utopian. With thematic sections on the social meaning of uniform in the military, in institutions, and political movements, its use in fashion, in the workplace, and at leisure, a series of case studies consider what sartorial uniformity means to the history of the body and society. Ranging from English public school uniform to sacred dress in the Vatican, from Australian airline uniforms to the garb worn by soldiers in combat, Uniform draws attention to a visual and material practice with the power to regulate or disrupt civil society. Bringing together original research from emerging and established academics, this book is essential reading for students and scholars of fashion, design, art, popular culture, anthropology, cultural history, and sociology, as well as anyone interested in what constitutes a "modern" appearance.

Veils, Turbans, and Islamic Reform in Northern Nigeria tells the story of Islamic reform from the perspective of dress, textile production, trade, and pilgrimage over the past 200 years. As Islamic reformers have sought to address societal problems such as poverty, inequality, ignorance, unemployment, extravagance, and corruption, they have used textiles as a means to express their religious positions on these concerns. Home first to the early indigo trade and later to a thriving textile industry, northern Nigeria has been a center for Islamic practice as well as a place where everything from women's hijabs to turbans, buttons, zippers, short pants, and military uniforms offers a statement on Islam. Elisha P. Renne argues that awareness of material distinctions, religious ideology, and the political and economic contexts from which successive Islamic reform groups have emerged is important for understanding how people in northern Nigeria continue to seek a proper Islamic way of being in the world and how they imagine their futures—spiritually, economically, politically, and environmentally.

This volume presents multiple sides to dress codes in schools. It recognizes the intimate relationship between its subject and reader as it weaves together different points of view that concern students' rights to wear what they want to wear. Can students fight dress codes? Should teachers have dress codes? Are uniforms a way of controlling young people? Should school uniforms accommodate Muslim culture? These questions and more are answered in this book.

Through analyzing dress in detective fiction, Fear and Clothing reveals a cultural history of identity affected by the social upheaval caused by war. In-depth analysis of interwar publications by a comprehensive range of writers reveals readers' anxieties and fears about class, gender and race and how these changed over the period. Although read and written by both men and women, detective fiction was deemed at the time to be a masculine and high-status entertainment. However the literature demonstrates an admiration and acceptance of the woman's identity, performed during the Great War and continuing throughout the interwar period, as girl pal and female gentleman. In chapters that explore age, character, class, masculinity, performative womanhood and race, Jane Custance Baker exposes how dress was a status marker to both male and female readers, made anxious by social change brought about by war. Dress in detective fiction reveals a set of signs to be read, digested, and possibly employed to model the individual reader's personal dress choices. Fear and Clothing sheds new light on dress of the period, the social and cultural environment as depicted in the popular fiction genre in the early 20th century, and is of interest to researchers and scholars within dress history, literary and historical studies, as well as anyone who enjoys the history of detective fiction.

This collection brings together cutting-edge research on the history of embodiment, health and schooling in an international context. The book distinguishes a set of educational technologies, schooling practices and school-based public health programmes that organise and influence the bodies of children and young people, defining the curriculum of the body. Taking a historical approach, with a focus on the period in which mass schooling became an international phenomenon, the book is organised according to four major themes. The first positions the school as a modern clinical space, followed by the second that explores programmes and curricula which influence the discipline of and care for the body. The third section examines the role of the built environment on the organisation and experience of children’s bodies, and the final section outlines the pedagogies, rules and routines that determine how the body is treated and experienced in school. International and multidisciplinary in scope, this unique collection is of interest to postgraduate students and researchers in education and public health, as well as history, policy studies and sociology.