Fashion Desire & Anxiety: Image and Morality in the Twentieth Century - Tapa dura

Reseña del editor

Drawing upon both contemporary visual and written sources, this book illuminates the role that fashion plays in reflecting and shaping attitudes toward display and adornment. As traditional cultural notions of what is admissible or acceptable have fragmented, fashion has been a key site for experimentation. At both the haute couture and street level, clothing enables identities to be visualized, confronting the spectator with contradictory messages embodying the confusion of the time.Rebecca Arnold focuses on the last thirty years and places the desires and anxieties that surround fashion in their historical context. She highlights four key themes: -- Status, Power, and Display (the flaunting of wealth, the alienating power structures of good taste), -- Violence and Provocation (the rising tide of aggression in both fashion imagery and street styles), -- The Eroticized Body (the power of sex and display and the pressure to conform to ideals), and-- Gender and Subversion (the blurring of identity to disguise and confuse).This richly illustrated book always keeps its focus on the historical and ethical potential and possibilities that modern fashion embodies.

Reseña del editor

Fashion, and the glossy magazines it inhabits, allow Western culture to dream. It permits a person to fantasize and to experiment with new identities. It flaunts glamour and success. Appearance becomes something to be perfected and admired.

These dreams and freedoms, Rebecca Arnold proposes, are contradictory. Fashion and its surrounding imagery elicit fear and anxiety in their consumers as well as pleasure. Fashion has come to incorporate the underside of modern life, with violence and decay becoming a dominant theme in clothing design and photography.

Arnold draws on diverse written sources to explore the complex nature of modern fashion. She discusses a range of key themes: how fashion uses and abuses the power of wealth; the alienating promotion of "good" taste; the power plays of sex and display; and how identities can be blurred to disguise and confuse. In order to unravel the contradictory emotions of desire and anxiety they provoke, she never loses sight of the historical and cultural contexts in which fashion designers and photographers perform.

Generously illustrated, Fashion, Desire and Anxiety focuses on the last thirty years, from photographic works of the 1970s to the beginning of the twenty-first century.