Joanne Finkelstein

From the rise of the Fashion Café to the phenomenon of the supermodel, from "House of Style" to "Unzipped," the world of fashion has taken center stage in contemporary culture, for better or for worse. In turn, although the idea of fashion has been in circulation since time immemorial, not until recently has its profound and variegated effects–on economic activity, on social and sexual mores, and on aesthetic and psychological formulations–been fully considered. With delicacy and wit, Fashion: An Introduction investigates the different sides of recent debates over the production, marketing, and consumption of fashion. Drawing on economics, art, psychology, commerce, history, and the everyday, Joanne Finkelstein considers fashion in its various guises–as body decoration and costume, as a language and a form of display, as an expression of sexuality and as part of the urban experience. In so doing, she has given us the perfect introduction to fashion's social, economic, and aesthetic impact on the way we think and act.

An Introduction

Fashion

image and identity in popular visual culture

art of self invention

A guide which lists in alphabetical order consumer habits and practices and analyses their meaning in our lives. The author teaches at the Centre for Cultural Studies, Monash University. Her other books are 'Dining Out'' and 'The Fashioned Self''.

An A-Z of Consumer Pleasures

Slaves of Chic

Susan Goodwin

The Sociological Bent: Inside Metro Culture is an engaging introduction to sociology and to some exciting, illuminating and powerful ways of thinking about society. Written in a clear and accessible style, and drawing on the work of both contemporary and classical sociologists, this innovative text explores the relationships between various cultural forms, institutional sites and the practices of everyday life. The text is divided into thirty-seven short, digestible modules that address issues and topics of interest to contemporary students, ranging from passports and car advertising to personal hygiene and sex re-assignment surgery. Core concepts such as modernity, hegemony, ideology, discourse and culture are discussed in order to provide intellectual frameworks for the reading of diverse cultural forms and practices. Students are encouraged to move beyond commonsense assumptions about social experience and to theorise many naturalised and familiar aspects of their everyday lives, such as:* celebrity and the social functions of fame* fashions in food, clothing and consumer goods* globalisation, corporate collapse and crime* the nature of 'belonging' to nations, groups or subcultures* transformations in intimacy, and in sex and gender relations.The text also introduces students to a range of methods for comprehending contemporary life - including social semiotics, discourse analysis, field immersion and ethnography - equipping them with the most sophisticated tools of analysis that current scholarship can provide. The Sociological Bent demonstrates the diversity of sociological thinking and research, and explains the historical background and meaning of the key concepts applied in each area of focus. It provides students with an excellent foundation for developing a sociological understanding of the contemporary world, as well as the sociological framework or infrastructure required for them to undertake further sociological studies.

The Sociological Bent

A Sociology of Modern Manners

Dining Out

With epigrams from Genesis to Oscar Wilde, Finkelstein examines the historical, social, psychological, and economic seams of haute couture fashion as reflected in the wide-ranging index entries: anthropology, Barbie doll, cinema, feminism, globalization, Lauren (Ralph), psychoanalysis, upward mobility, and zoot suits. Originally published by Melbourne U. Press, 1996. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

After a Fashion

This book examines the nature of the self and self-identity in the modern age, and the way in which they have been moulded through the alteration of bodily appearance, exemplified fashions, facelifts and diets. The idea that an individual's character is revealed through physical appearance is, Finkelstein argues, deeply embedded in Western culture. And since fashions and cosmetics are closely linked to sexual difference, the author concentrates on aspects of gender identity, suggesting that the female and male identity are differentiated through opposed experiences of the body.

The Fashioned Self

Both an exploration of the ways in which we fashion our public identity and a manual of modern sociability, this lively and readable book explores the techniques we use to present ourselves to the world: body language, tone of voice, manners, demeanour, 'personality' and personal style. Drawing on historical commentators from Castiglione to Machiavelli, and from Marcel Mauss to Roland Barthes, Joanne Finkelstein looks to popular visual culture, including Hollywood film and makeover TV, to show how it provides blueprints for the successful construction of 'persona'. She also discusses the role of fashion and of status symbols and how advertising sells these to us in our never ending quest for social mobility. Finkelstein's interest here is not in the veracity of the self - recently dissected by critical theory - but rather in the ways in which we style this 'self', in the enduring appeal of the 'new you' and in our fascination with deception, fraudulent personalities and impostors.

Image and Identity in Popular Visual Culture

The Art of Self Invention

It can no longer be said that we are just what we eat. In the contested sphere of gastronomy divided between the golden arches of McDonalds and the prized stars of Michelin where personal identity is expressed through a frenetic quest for socially-approved tastes and distinctions, where, when, how and with whom we eat has become just as fundamental in defining who we are. In this follow-on to her classic 1989 work Dining Out: A Sociology of Modern Manners, Joanne Finkelstein takes a fragment of social life, dining out in restaurants, and uses it to examine the nature and meaning of manners and social relations in the modern world. In Fashioning Appetite, the restaurant becomes a liminal space in which public and privte boundaries are constantly renegotiated, in which our personal celebrations and seductions are conducted within full view of the next table, and where eating alone has become a perilous social minefield. When food is fetishized ad identity becomes a capitalist commodity, the experience of the restaurant transforms appetite into both a pleasure and a torment where being satisfied with one's meal is also about being satisfied with oneself. Applying new research in emotional capitalism to popular culture's pervasive images of conspicuous consumption, Finkelstein builds a cultural portrait in which every forfkful is weighted with meaning.

Joanne Finkelstein

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