Fashion History

This  dissertation  provides  an  examination  of  the  cultural  significance  of  mannequins during the interwar years. As women grew increasingly visible outside of domestic roles subsequent  to  the  First  World  War  and  emerging  trends  for  streamlined  and  practical fashion posed an assault on traditional ideals of femininity, this thesis questions why it was  that  mannequins  became  suddenly  more  realistic  than  those  seen  in  previous decades.

The paper would give information about a first description of Rosa Genoni and Alfredo Podreider (Genoni's husband) archive carried out between 2015 and 2016 under the supervision of Lombardy So-printendenza archivistica (regional archive authority) and the State Archive of Milan by Manuela Soldi, who studied Genoni during her doctoral research. In Milan between XIX°and XX°century, Rosa Genoni was a teacher and a tailor famous for her proposal of Italian Fashion during the Milan International Exhibition in 1906, also known for her socialist militancy and pacifist ideas. The work on the archive highlights the bonds between the various fields of Genoni's activities, showing the complex remaining of a life and a family. The archive is not only a source for fashion studies but also for other branch of knowledge, which needs a comprehensive description to allow its conservation and investigation .

What is fashion? Where does it come from? Why has it come to permeate modern life? In the last half century, questions like these have drawn serious academic reflection, resulting in a new field of research-fashion studies-and generating a rich multidisciplinary discussion. Yet theology's voice has been conspicuously absent in this conversation. The time has finally come for theology to break her silence and join this decades-long conversation. Fashion Theology is the first of its kind: a serious and long-overdue account of the dynamic relationship between theology and fashion. Chronicling the epic journey from ancient Christian sources to current developments in fashion studies, cultural theologian Robert Covolo navigates the rich history of Christian thought as well as recent political, social, aesthetic, literary, and performance theory. Far from mere disparity or quick resolution, Covolo demonstrates that fashion and theology inhabit a mutual terrain that has, until recently, scarcely been imagined. Covolo retraces the way theologians have taken up fashion across history, unveiling how Christian thinkers have been fascinated with fashion well before the academy's current focus, and bringing these insights into the conversation with fashion itself: the logic by which fashion operates, how fashion shapes our world, and the way fashion imperceptibly molds our personal lives. Within fashion's realms reside some of life's greatest challenges: the foundations of political power, the basis for social order, the nature of aesthetics, how we inhabit time, and the means by which we tell stories about our lives-challenges, it turns out, that theologians also explore. Fashion favors the bold; theology demands humility. Holding the two together, Fashion Theology trailblazes an interdisciplinary path informed by a thoughtful engagement with the Christian witness. For those traversing this spectacle of unexpected crossroads and hotly contested terrain, the promise of fashion theology awaits with its myriad unexplored vistas.

Sonia Delaunay’s simultaneous dress of 1913 incorporates a heterogenous variety of materials in its patchwork structure, which includes both fur and fabrics of different weights and colours. By focusing on the relationship between art, fashion, and the tango, this article studies the dynamic between the tangibility and intangibility of Delaunay’s dress and proposes an interpretation related to the collage. The dress materialises the collage within the lexicon of fashion, while its texture incorporates fragments of movements, tango poses, and everything one could find drooped over the patronesses and patrons of the ballrooms of the age. This article transposes the concept of the collage from the surface of the dress to the space of the ballroom, and reflects on the new idea of intimacy and physical proximity encouraged by the fashion of the tango.

In The Proceedings of the 2nd Scientific Symposium on Neo-Hellenic Ecclesiastic Art, 26-28 November 2010, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Dept. of Theology, School of Theological Studies/ Byzantine and Christian Museum of Greece, Athens, 2012, pp. 315-342.

The paper looks at dandyism in Europe of the Nineteenth century and aims to offer a structural description of dandyism as a cultural semiotic system encompassing fashion, techniques of the body, emotional discipline and behavioral strategies. Special attention is paid to the aesthetic principle of Minimalism, and to the further development of theory of dandyism in mid-nineteenth-century treatises. The paper is focused around structural correspondences between different aspects of dandyism from dress and canons of elegance, to code of conduct, speech patterns and personal hygiene.

The key message of this book is: clothing matters. And it is not just that clothing matters for people who enjoy fashion, but that across time, space and culture, for man, woman and child, clothing and appearance is a fundamental way in which we express our identities, are judged by others and communicate semiotically. Habits of Being II: Exchanging Clothes offers a compelling insight into the way in which clothing affects and is affected by identity and social structure, from Homer's ubiquitous renditions of male armour, to Kate Chopin's humble but erotically charged stocking.

The use of material culture methodologies within the historical discipline has prompted scholars to redefine how and what we might consider primary source material. Subsequently, objects and their ‘process of making’ have come to play a more significant role in recent studies of social and cultural history. A growing body of scholarship has developed in order to investigate how objects have the potential to communicate within social groups, so becoming ‘objects of discourse’.
Within the study of political history, however, this approach is still very much in its infancy. This is particularly true in regards to the analysis of women’s dress and broader textile culture. Whilst the potential importance of the ‘politics of appearances’ and ‘dressing the body politic’ have been acknowledged, a methodology for assessing the impact of politically provocative textile culture within eighteenth century society remains significantly under-explored.

This paper outlines the research context and methodology of my thesis,
followed by an in-depth discussion of a number of politically invested textile objects created by women throughout the long eighteenth century. The main body of this discussion shall explore the visual and material language used in the design and execution of these objects, and the impact such a language might have had upon popular political discourses of the period. The production and display of such objects will also be discussed, with particular emphasis upon the private-to-public dimension of women’s textile craft. Political subjects under consideration include military and naval engagements, expressions of British patriotism, electoral and philanthropic campaigns, and national commemorations.
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Presented at the Difficult Women Conference: 1680-1830 (University of York: November 27-28, 2015). Winner of the Best Postgraduate Paper Prize, sponsored by the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies.

Architectonic is a hybrid experiment which raises questions within the field of inter-disciplinary research. The study explores
the opportunities that the dynamic between the cross-fertilization of architecture and fashion approaches may offer. The research
is substantiated via the production of three-dimensional leather garments which initiate key synthesis of materials, techniques and
processes and interrogates fabric, form and function, to evaluate whether there is prospect for re-alignment, new methodologies
and practices within a fashion context?

This research paper was for the completion of the "Materiality of Fashion" course instructed by Professor Sarah Scaturro, previous Head Conservator of the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Introduction: In the twentieth century, during the wake of modernist experimentation across the visual and performance arts to which fashion was linked, designers projected images of themselves by establishing relationships to such categories as the ‘new’, the ‘classic’, and the ‘timeless.’  Elizabeth Wilson explains, “fashion is dress in which the key feature is rapid and continual changing of styles. Fashion in a sense is change" (2003: 3).  Because fashion was and is in a constant state of movement, the industry was in an ongoing orientation of the new. As its own enterprise, the innovation and changeability suggest the multifaceted temporality of fashion.

Les taillades, vaste gamme d’incisions opérées sur les étoffes, sont un reflet de l’impact de la réglementation protocolaire et somptuaire sur la créativité des tailleurs pour garantir l’originalité de paraître de leur noble clientèle. Alors, quand Christoph Amberger portraiture Charles Quint en 1532 avec une paire de gants dont un seul est entaillé, il crée une iconographie qui pose la question des frontières entre image de mode et illusion picturale et interroge les enjeux de cette effigie pour présenter l’empereur à la société de cour.

The article examines Edward Linley Sambourne’s cartoon series ‘Mr. Punch’s Designs After Nature’ which appeared in Punch from the late 1860s onwards. The images show women morphing into animals and birds, or wearing them as exaggerated forms of decoration. Some of the cartoons explicitly satirise specific fashion trends or silhouettes, whilst others poke fun at fashion generally. The author’s focus is on the iconography of ‘Mr. Punch’s Designs After Nature’, the real 1860s and 1870s fashions giving rise to these images' creation, as well as the visual and textual tradition of satire within which Sambourne’s cartoons can be situated. The article pays particular attention to the re-evaluation of the relationship between human and non-human in the light of Darwin’s ideas, and to the gender-related aspects of Sambourne’s zoomorphic images.

At the turn of the twentieth century, the sampling market is moving from a trade-based industry to a service-oriented contemporary of the rise of the consulting and advertising businesses. The Parisian economy in the clothing industry is in accelerated motion and samplers belong to this core group of small apparel companies that ensure the complementarity between trade and technology.
As early as 1908-1910 the first fashion « défilés » are part of this growing segment of the the fashion industry which becomes more and more service-oriented In 1912 and 1914 the sampler Jean Claude Frères sends two letters to a silk fabric in the Lyon region. The samplers are no longer exclusively intermediaries that select, cut and serve. They gradually become mediators, observers or later prescribers to enhance the process of transmission of information.
This process of mediation will continue during the war to the measure of the availability of the raw material in Paris. The year 1915 will be complicated and samplers interrupt deliveries they will resume after 1916 smoothly. The war disrupted the process of mediation in the Paris fashion industries but it dot stop it. Samplers kept their relationships with their fabric suppliers established in the provinces or abroad.

The Symington Collection of Corsetry, Foundation and Swimwear held by Leicestershire County Museums Service is well known for its corsetry, but a lesser known fact is that it also contains over 450 bras made by both Symington and Courtaulds. This 10 minute academic presentation covered some of the discoveries the author made when viewing these garments and how it led to further exploration of a partially concealed thread of fashion history.

EVENT: Hidden in the Archive: London College of Fashion Archive Symposium 2015
DATE: 30th January 2015
LOCATION: London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London
ORGANISER: Jane Holt, LCF Archives & Centre for Fashion Curation

Este artículo pretende analizar la comercialización de los trastornos mentales en la industria de la moda re-conceptualizando el consumo como seguimiento basado en la identificación social. El propósito de este análisis es profundizar en la duda: ¿Por qué se sigue viendo la comercialización de los trastornos mentales en la industria de la moda a las puertas de 2020? Para poder aportar luz a esta cuestión, este ensayo pretende repasar ciertos aspectos de la industria de la moda a nivel sociológico para el análisis del porqué se siguen comercializando y comprando productos basados en los trastornos mentales y, al fin y al cabo, en problemáticas sociales. La base científica de investigación de cara a la resolución de esta duda se provee en los conceptos de disonancia cognitiva de León Festinger (1957), que recuperan Beasley y Joslyn (2001).
Palabras clave: industria de la moda, comercialización, trastornos mentales, identificación como obediencia, disonancia cognitiva

Negli ultimi decenni si sono moltiplicati gli eventi, pubblici e privati, a cura di associazioni, gruppi storici e/o enti cittadini, che usano la Storia come sfondo sul quale tratteggiare le proprie attività. In Italia, grazie anche alle splendide località dove la Storia riesce ancora a far palpitare i cuori per la presenza di castelli e borghi che conservano intatto il profumo del passato, questo è un settore vivo e vitale, capace di suscitare grande attenzione e partecipazione. Non sempre, però, coloro che chiedono un abito "storico" hanno chiaro quali sono le opzioni nel realizzarli, il che genera spesso confusione e provoca tensioni e in-comprensioni, anche all'interno dei gruppi di appartenenza. Questa serie di libri, della quale il presente fa parte, vuole essere una piccola guida nel campo della realizzazione dell'abbigliamento "storico" per tutti coloro che si muovono nel vasto, multiforme e affascinante mondo della cosiddetta "rievocazione", perché è ben diverso realizzare un abito storico per un gruppo di appassiona-ti ricostruttori o per il corteo storico di una città, per un evento fantasy o per un dramma sacro legato ad una sentita festività religiosa, per un Palio cittadino o per un gruppo di studenti impegnati in un gioco di ruolo, per il carnevale o per la sezione didattica di un museo. Uno strumento per chiunque si approcci al costume storico dal punto di vista pratico, non necessariamente con grandi competenze, grandi budget o molto tempo a disposizione, ma-questo si-possibilmente con curiosità e voglia di sperimentare.
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Étude approfondie de l’iconographie textile et vestimentaire du portrait de François Ier peint par Jean Clouet afin de proposer une relecture d’une herméneutique plus complexe que ne l’ont laissé penser les recherches fondamentales de Cécile Scailliérez. Riche de découvertes inédites quant à l’habillement du portrait, c’est à la fois sa fonction, son commanditaire et sa datation qui ont pu être précisés.

Pam Cook asserts, in her analysis of costume design, that “clothing marks the threshold between the body and the outside world, between private and public. Fashion… it is both self-expression and social pressure, compelling us to conform.”  The examples that the lecturer provided, which span the course of western history, illustrate the tension that fashion presents to individuals partaking in its use. Despite the technical mastery of Rembrandt, Memling, and Copley, fashion remains static through the medium of art and can only truly come to life through film. While these paintings, as they will examined further throughout this paper, attempt to tell stories about who these people were, they serve as snapshots of this tension between self-expression and social pressure.

Friends of Robert Browning, Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde, the aesthetes Katherine Bradley and her niece Edith Cooper were the Gilbert and George of the Victorian fin de siècle. Together they were the male poet ‘Michael Field’, and they expressed their joint authorship through dress.  Literary critics have recently begun to pay close attention to women’s clothes mostly through the study of literary sources, fashion manuals and periodical publications. And yet, while we know a lot about the theory of women’s aesthetic clothes, and even more about male aesthetes, we actually know very little about how aesthetic women wore the garb.  This chapter  looks at their poetics of clothing to examine what their clothes reveal about their aestheticism.

Book review. Michael Carter: Being Prepared: Aspects of Dress and Dressing. Sydney: Puncher & Wattmann, 2017, 210 pp., ISBN 978-1-9221-8694-2.

The meanings of dress, clothing and fashion are so intermingled nowadays that it is hard to speak about one without inferring the others. Dress is mainly about appearance, the visual, while fashion includes the social meanings and functions of dress. Clothing occupies a central place in contemporary dress and fashion, but clothing is also a technology with properties and functions unrelated to dress and fashion. For these reasons, the overlap between dress and clothing can create problems when considering questions of origins.