Adam Geczy

Vicki Karaminas

From Westwood to Van Beirendonck

Critical Fashion Practice

Body, Space and Performance

Fashion Installation

Bringing together original, cutting-edge contributions from leading international scholars across a range of disciplines, this book is essential reading for anyone interested in exploring the intersections and changing relationship between fashion and art, past and present.

Fashion and Art

Artificial bodies constructed in human likeness, from uncanny automatons to mechanical dolls, have long played a complex and subtle role in human identity and culture. This book takes a range of these bodies, from antiquity to the present day, to explore how we seek out echoes, caricatures and replications of ourselves in order to make sense of the complex world in which we live. Packed with case studies, from the commedia del'arte to Hans Bellmer and the 1980s supermodel, this volume explores the divide between the “real” and the constructed. Arguing that the body “other” plays a crucial role in the formation of the self physically and psychologically, leading scholar Adam Geczy contends that the “natural” body has been replaced by a series of imaginary archetypes in our post-modern world, central to which is the figure of the doll. The Artificial Body in Fashion and Art provides a much-needed synthesis of constructed bodies across time and place, drawing on fashion theory, theatre studies and material culture, to explore what the body means in the realms of identity, gender, performance and art.

Marionettes, Models and Mannequins

The Artificial Body in Fashion and Art

Libertine practices have long been associated with transgression and social deviance. This innovative book is the first to focus fully on the relationship between libertinism as a social phenomenon and as a form of fashion. Taking the reader from early modernity to the present day, Adam Geczy and Vicki Karaminas reveal how the connection between clothing and the taboo, the erotic, and the forbidden is at the heart of "libertine fashion". Moving from the decadent courts of Charles II and Louis XV to the catwalks of the 21st century, Libertine Fashion examines literary and sartorial figures ranging from the Marquis de Sade and Lord Byron to Oscar Wilde, Josephine Baker, Colette, and Madonna. Focusing on libertinism as a sartorial practice and identity, this book traces the genealogy of the concept through the proto feminists of the English Reformation, the hedonistic decadents of the fin de siècle, and the Flappers of the Roaring 20s. The historical arc traverses the 1970s era of punk and glam, the shapeshifting personae of David Bowie, and the “disciplinary regimes” of Jean-Paul Gaultier. Looking at libertine practices and appearances with fresh eyes, this bracing and original book affords many new insights into transgressive style, and of the relationship between sexuality and clothing. Accessible and thoroughly researched, Libertine Fashion uses a multidisciplinary approach that draws on historical literature, film, fashion, philosophy, and popular culture. Offering a historical and philosophical grounding in contemporary forms of identity and dress, it is essential reading for students and scholars of fashion, gender, sexuality, and cultural studies.

Sexual Freedom, Rebellion, and Style

Libertine Fashion

Pop art has traditionally been the most visible visual art within popular culture because its main transgression is easy to understand: the infiltration of the “low” into the “high”. The same cannot be said of contemporary art of the 21st century, where the term “Gaga Aesthetics” characterizes the condition of popular culture being extensively imbricated in high culture, and vice-versa. Taking Adorno and Horkheimer's "The Culture Industry" and Adorno's Aesthetic Theory as key touchstones, this book explores the dialectic of high and low that forms the foundation of Adornian aesthetics and the extent to which it still applied, and the extent to which it has radically shifted, thereby 'upending tradition'. In the tradition of philosophical aesthetics that Adorno began with Lukács, this explores the ever-urgent notion that high culture has become deeply enmeshed with popular culture. This is “Gaga Aesthetics”: aesthetics that no longer follows clear fields of activity, where “fine art” is but one area of critical activity. Indeed, Adorno's concepts of alienation and the tragic, which inform his reading of the modernist experiment, are now no longer confined to art. Rather, stirring examples can be found in phenomena such as fashion and music video. In addition to dealing with Lady Gaga herself, this book traverses examples ranging from Madonna's Madam X to Moschino and Vetements, to deliberate on the strategies of subversion in the culture industry.

Art, Fashion, Popular Culture, and the Up-Ending of Tradition

Gaga Aesthetics

Sean Lowry

Simone Douglas

Featuring chapters by a diverse range of leading international artists and theorists, this book suggests that contemporary art is increasingly characterized by the problem of where and when it is situated. While much advanced artistic speculation of the twentieth-century was aligned with the question “what is art?,” a key question for many artists and thinkers in the twenty-first century has become “where is art?” Contributors explore the challenge of meaningfully identifying and evaluating works located across multiple versions and locations in space and time. In doing so, they also seek to find appropriate language and criteria for evaluating forms of art that often straddle other realms of knowledge and activity. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, contemporary art, art criticism, and philosophy of art.

Space, Time, and Location in Contemporary Art

Where is Art?

Attitudes to fashion have changed radically in the twenty-first century. Dress is increasingly approached as a means of self-expression, rather than as a signifier of status or profession, and designers are increasingly treated as 'artists', as fashion moves towards art and enters the gallery, museum, and retail space. This book is the first to fully explore the causes and implications of this shift, examining the impact of technological innovation, globalization, and the growth of the internet. The End of Fashion focuses on the ways in which our understanding of fashion and the fashion system have transformed as mass mediation and digitization continue to broaden the way that contemporary fashion is perceived and consumed. Exploring everything from the rise of online shopping to the emergence of bloggers as power elites who have revolutionized the terrain of traditional fashion reportage, this volume anatomizes a world in which runway shows now compete with live-streaming, digital fashion films, Instagram, and Pinterest. Bringing together original, cutting-edge contributions from leading international scholars, this book is essential reading for students and scholars of fashion and cultural studies, as well as anyone interested in exploring the dramatic shifts that have shaken the fashion world this century – and what they might say about larger changes within an increasingly global and digital society.

Clothing and Dress in the Age of Globalization

The End of Fashion

For hundreds of years consumers and scholars have acknowledged that food is affected by the same rapid shifts in taste and consumption as clothing. Trends in fashion and in food are increasingly being marketed in tandem and sold as fashionable commodities to reinforce capitalist power. Yet despite this, the reciprocal relationship between fashion and food has not been fully explored – until now. Gastrofashion from Haute Cuisine to Haute Couture examines the relationship between food and fashion in clothing, style, and dress in all its manifestations, from the restaurant to the catwalk, to cookbooks, diet fads, slow food, fast fashion, celebrity chefs, artists, and musical performers. It traces the relationship between food and fashion back to the Middle Ages, to the rise of social refinements in manners, speech, clothing, and taste, when behaviours and appearances reflected social status and propriety and where the social display of wealth and privilege were inseparable from food and clothing. Nowadays, designer eateries such as Pasticceria Prada and Armani Ristorante and the display of food on fashion catwalks are the precursors of the restaurants of pre-Revolutionary France and the spectacles of world fairs and exhibitions. This much-needed book offers a substantive and incisive discussion for all those interested in the complex interrelationship between food and fashion – scholars, students, and general readers alike.

Fashion and Food

Gastrofashion from Haute Cuisine to Haute Couture

Jonathan McBurnie

Critical studies of the graphic novel have often employed methodologies taken from film theory and art criticism. Yet, as graphic novels from Maus to Watchmen entered the literary canon, perhaps the time has come to develop theories for interpreting and evaluating graphic novels that are drawn from classic models of literary theory and criticism. Using the methodology of Georg Lukács and his detailed defense of literary realism as a socially embedded practice, Litcomix tackles difficult questions about reading graphic novels as literature. What critical standards should we use to measure the quality of a graphic novel? How does the genre contribute to our understanding of ourselves and the world? What qualities distinguish it from other forms of literature? LitComix hones its theoretical approach through case studies taken from across the diverse world of comics, from Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s groundbreaking manga to the Hernandez Brothers’ influential alt-comix. Whether looking at graphic novel adaptations of Proust or considering how Jack Kirby’s use of intertextuality makes him the Balzac of comics, this study offers fresh perspectives on how we might appreciate graphic novels as literature.

Literary Theory and the Graphic Novel

Litcomix

Queer Style offers an insight into queer fashionability by addressing the role that clothing has played in historical and contemporary lifestyles. From a fashion studies perspective, it examines the function of subcultural dress within queer communities and the mannerisms and messages that are used as signifiers of identity. Diverse dress is examined, including effeminate 'pansy,' masculine macho 'clone,' the 'lipstick' and 'butch' lesbian styles and the extreme styles of drag kings and drag queens. Divided into three main sections on history, subcultural identity and subcultural style, Queer Style will be of particular interest to students of dress and fashion as well as those coming to subculture from sociology and cultural studies.

Queer Style

Pamela Church Gibson

Queers, Pimp Daddies, and Lumbersexuals

Fashionable Masculinities

Mere clothing is transformed into desirable fashion by the way it is represented in imagery. Fashion's Double examines how meanings are projected onto garments through their representation, whether in painting, photography, cinema or online fashion film, conveying identity and status, eliciting fascination and desire. With in-depth case studies including the work of Nick Knight and Helmut Newton, film examples such as The Hunger Games, music video Girl Panic by Duran Duran, and much more, this book analyses the interrelationship between clothing, identity, embodiment, representation and self-representation. Written for students and scholars alike, Fashion's Double will appeal to anyone studying fashion, cultural studies, art theory and history, photography, sociology, and film.

Representations of Fashion in Painting, Photography and Film

Fashion's Double

Combining transnationalism and exoticism, transorientalism is the new orientalism of the age of globalization. With its roots in earlier times, it is a term that emphasizes alteration, mutation, and exchange between cultures. While the familiar orientalisms persist, transorientalism is a term that covers notions like the adoption of a hat from a different country for Turkish nationalist dress, the fact that an Italian could be one of the most influential directors in recent Chinese cinema, that Muslim women artists explore Islamic womanhood in non-Islamic countries, that artists can embrace both indigenous and non-indigenous identity at the same time. This is more than nostalgia or bland nationalism. It is a reflection of the effect that communication and representation in recent decades have brought to the way in which national identity is crafted and constructed-yet this does not make it any less authentic. The diversity of race and culture, the manner in which they are expressed and transacted, are most evident in art, fashion, and film. This much-needed book offers a refreshing, informed, and incisive account of a paradigm shift in the ways in which identity and otherness is moulded, perceived, and portrayed.

Inventions of Identity

Transorientalism in Art, Fashion, and Film

There is a new form of design practice within the contemporary fashion industry which is active in complex forms of social commentary and critique. While fashion in the modernist era has shown signs of criticism and subversion, these were either in the form of subcultures or perversions, such as punk or BDSM styling. Today, however, these genres have been absorbed into the fashion industry itself, meaning that "critical fashion†? is now far from limited to the subcultures from which it came. This book explores this new space for criticism within the popular fashion sphere to demonstrate how designers are disrupting conventions, challenging beliefs and stirring change from within the system itself. Critical Fashion Practice considers a range of contemporary designers across the globe, from the US to Japan, whose conceptual designs embody this critical language, including case studies such as Rei Kawakubo's deconstructive silhouettes for Comme des Garçons and Walter Van Beirendonck's sadomasochistic menswear collections, amongst other key players such as Miuccia Prada, Vivienne Westwood and Viktor & Rolf. Arguing that the rise of critical fashion coincides with a noticeable decline in the criticality of art, Geczy and Karaminas go beyond slotting fashion into previously established art theories. Conceiving a new cultural role for fashion that affords insight into identity, class, race, sexuality and gender, this book shows how fashion can not only reflect and comment on, but can also be a part of social change.

Pop art has been traditionally been the most visible visual art within popular culture, because its main transgression is easy to understand: the infiltration of the “low” into the “high”. The same cannot be said of contemporary art of the 21st century, where the term “Gaga Aesthetics” characterizes the condition of popular culture being extensively imbricated in high culture, and vice-versa. Taking Adorno and Horkheimer's "The Culture Industry" as a crucial departure point, this book explores the dialectic of high and low that forms the foundation of Adornian aesthetics as well as those in his wake, such as Arthur Danto, and Donald Kuspit. This book considers the tradition of philosophical aesthetics, and the extent to which Adorno's aesthetics may still have valency at a time when high culture has become deeply enmeshed with popular culture. This is “Gaga Aesthetics”, aesthetics that no longer follows clear fields of activity, where “fine art” is but one area of critical activity. Indeed, Adorno's concepts of alienation and the tragic, which inform his reading of the modernist experiment, are now no longer confined to art. Rather, stirring examples can be found in phenomena such as fashion and music video. In addition to dealing with Lady Gaga herself, this book traverses examples renaging from Madonna's Madam X to Moschino and Vetements, to deliberate on the strategies of subversion of the culture industry from within.

This fascinating and wide-ranging book reveals the influence that the Orient had, and continues to have, on fashion.

Adam Geczy

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