This two-volume set presents information and images of the varied clothing and textiles of cultures around the world, allowing readers to better appreciate the richness and diversity of human culture and history. The contributors to Encyclopedia of National Dress: Traditional Clothing around the World examine clothing that is symbolic of the people who live in regions all over the world, providing a historical and geographic perspective that illustrates how people dress and explains the reasons behind the material, design, and style. The encyclopedia features a preface and introduction to its contents. Each entry in the encyclopedia includes a short historical and geographical background for the topic before discussing the clothing of people in that country or region of the world. This work will be of great interest to high school students researching fashion, fashion history, or history as well as to undergraduate students and general readers interested in anthropology, textiles, fashion, ethnology, history, or ethnic dress.

During Queen Victoria's long reign there were constant, often subtle, changes to men's clothing in the large, diverse and growing population. This practical book guides you through the male fashions of the time and includes eighteen garments typical of the era. Each project is carefully grounded in historical research, while traditional tailoring techniques are simplified for the modern costume maker. It is an essential handbook that describes fabrics and tools for pattern drafting, tailoring and costume construction, and explains how to get the best results from each. It covers a wide variety of gentleman's attire adaptable for different occupations and social status, including assorted shirts, trousers, breeches, a tailcoat, a jacket, a frockcoat and several waistcoats. There is a full set of patterns for each outfit, along with clear, full colour construction photographs and finally, the author suggests how outfits can be adapted to fit different sizes and characters, and gives practical insights into the making process. It's ideal for anyone interested in Victorian costumes including theatre designers, theatre makers, re-enactors, historical enthusiasts and live action role-playing (LARP). Superbly illustrated with 232 colour photographs and patterns, it is written by Sil Devilly, a costume maker with over twenty years of experience in both design interpretation and construction.

Hair—whether present or absent, restored or removed, abundant or scarce, long or short, bound or unbound, colored or natural—marks a person as clearly as speech, clothing, and smell. It defines a person's gender, sexual availability and desirability, age, social status, and even political stance. It may also act as a basis for discrimination in treatment by others. While hair's high salience as both sign and symbol extends cross-culturally through time, its denotations are far from universal. Hair is an interdisciplinary look at the meanings of hair, hairiness, and hairlessness in Asian cultures, from classical to contemporary contexts. The contributors draw on a variety of literary, archaeological, religious, and ethnographic evidence. They examine scientific, medical, political, and popular cultural discourses. Topics covered include monastic communities and communities of fashion, hair codes and social conventions of rank, attitudes of enforcement and rebellion, and positions of privilege and destitution. Different interpretations include hair as a key aspect of female beauty, of virility, as obscene, as impure, and linked with other symbolic markers in bodily, social, political, and cosmological constructs.