Over the past three centuries, London has established itself as one of the world's most inventive fashion capitals. 'Fashioning London' looks at the manner in which particular styles of dress became associated with this leading international city.

While much attention has been paid to the making of Paris in the work of writers and artists, little is known about the city as defined and created by the fashion media. Filling this gap in studies of the French capital, this original and illuminating book focuses on how the French fashion press - with its rich conjunction of words and images - has been able to construct Paris as a leading world fashion city.Based in an original analysis of fashion writing and images in contemporary French fashion magazines and newspapers, the book shows how the fashion media have been central to the consecration of the city of Paris on the fashion map, as well as its celebration in the collective imaginary. Agnes Rocamora explores, for example, the figures of 'la Parisienne' and 'la passante' (the female passer by), and the presence of the Eiffel tower in fashion visuals. She gives attention to the continuum between the French journalistic discourse and that of cultural forms such as films, paintings and literature, thus revealing the persistence across texts and time of visions of Paris and shedding light on the production and reproduction of the Paris myth.

The book explores the dandy as a cultural type across Europe and Russia from the eighteenth century through the present day. Olga Vainshtein offers a unique view on dandyism as a cultural tradition, based not merely on fashionable attire, but also as a particular lifestyle with specific standards of behaviour, bodily practices and conceptual approaches to dress. The dandy is described as the prototypical hero of the modern cult of celebrities. From clubbing manners, the techniques of virtual aristocratism, urban flâneurs and the correct way to examine people, Vainshtein walks us through optical duels and the techniques of visual assessment at social gatherings. Readers will learn about strategies of subversive behaviour found in practical jokes, the fine art of noble scandal, dry wit, bare-faced impudence and mocking politeness. Looking at dandyism as a nineteenth-century literary movement, Vainshtein examines representation of dandies in fiction. Finally, a large section is devoted to Russian and Soviet dandyism and the dandies of today.

With a focus on sub-Saharan Africa, Fashioning the Afropolis provides a range of innovative perspectives on global fashion, design, dress, photography, and the body in some of the major cities, with a focus on Lagos, Johannesburg, Dakar, and Douala. It contributes to the ongoing debates around the globalization of fashion and fashion theory by exploring fashion as a genuine urban phenomenon on the continent and among its diasporas. To date, “fashion” and “city” have not been systematically related to each other in the African context and, for too long, a western-centric gaze has dominated scholarship, resulting in the perception of Africa as provincial and its visual arts and textile cultures as static and folkloristic. This perspective is all the more distorted, given Africa's rich sartorial past. With a huge number of tailors ready to adapt and renew clothing, reshaping garments into contemporary styles, and many cities in Africa becoming hot-spots for a steadily growing and well-connected scene of fashion designers in the past 20 years, the time is ripe for a reevaluation and reconsideration of the fashionscapes of Africa. Leading scholars offer an updated empirical and theoretical foundation on which to base new and exciting research on sub-Saharan fashion, challenging perceptions and offering new insights.

The valuing of old clothes as “vintage” and the recollection of the sartorial past, whether through second-hand consumption or the wearing of new old-fashioned clothes, has become a widespread phenomenon. This book illuminates sartorial and bodily engagements with memory and time through the temporal and nostalgic potency of fashion, and what this means for contemporary wearers. Based on in-depth ethnographic research including participant observation and interviews with sixties enthusiasts in Germany, who relocate British mod style into the twenty-first century, Jenss examines the practices and experiences that are part of the sartorial remembering of “the sixties,” from hunting flea markets and eBay, to the affect of material and mediated memories on vintage wearers. Jenss offers unique insights into the fashioning of time, cultural memory, and modernity, tracing the history and current appeal of vintage in fashion and youth culture, and asking: what kind of experiences of temporality and memory are enacted through fashion? How have evaluations of second-hand clothes shifted in the twentieth century? Fashioning Memory provides a unique insight into the diverse use of fashion as a memory mode and asks how style is remembered, performed, transformed, and reinvested across time, place, and generation.

In what ways do changing notions of social class correspond with key developments in the history of fashion? Focusing on examples ranging from 18th-century Britain to aspects of the global fashion industry in the early 21st century, Fashion and Class examines the meaning and evolution of the term 'class', from its Marxist origins to modern day interpretations. Did industrialisation, technological change and developments in fashion retailing bring about a degree of 'class levelling' or in fact intensify class antagonism? And to what extent does modern mass consumption and cheap labour revive some of the ethical issues faced in 19th-century British textile factories? Exploring a variety of case studies that examine the changing relationships between fashion and class in different historical contexts, from the French revolutionaries of the 1780-90s through to the changing relationships between couture, designer and high-street fashion in the mid-20th century and onwards, Fashion and Class is essential reading for those wishing to understand the ways in which the fashion system is closely connected with ideas of class.

This is the first edited collection of its kind to analyse the distinct but overlapping topics of dress, costume, sport and leisure history. For researchers of bodily adornment and movement, sport and costume history are both primarily concerned with industrial practice and embodied experience. The ways in which bodies are adorned, embellished and clothed (or revealed) highlights the hybrid nature of dress history, encompassing as it does the everyday clothing solutions of the mass of people and the unusual or more ceremonial aspects of costume, as well as elite high fashion. Although this is as yet an under-researched area, there are an increasing number of fashion and clothing undergraduate and postgraduate courses that specialise in sport and leisurewear. This publication is intended to give an introductory overview of the historical and contemporary issues as it does for the growing number of sport marketing and sports studies courses concerned with dress, costume history and branding. This book was published as a special issue of Sport in History.