Abstract:
Writers from poets to philosophers engaged with fashion throughout the nineteenth century, frequently charting their own musings on the quixotic nature of fashionable change with their wider intellectual enquiry on topics ranging from etiquette to the economy. The idea of 'woman' was central to this enquiry, and the empire of fashion became closely connected to women's lives and imaginations in new ways, as well as men's judgments of them. It could be argued that fashion studies as opposed to dress or costume studies emerged in the period 1960-1980 from the awakened interest in nineteenth-century visual culture. In the 1960s the art historical communities recognized the study of dress, costume and fashion as necessary tools for the understanding of visual culture and as a subject in its own right. This coincided with a desire to understand an beyond modernist canons, such as official Salon or pompier an, as well as interrogating the subject matter of modernist practice, much of which presented contemporary fashions in striking new ways. The Women's Studies, Left Criticism and <Victorian' studies of the 1970s and early 1980s probably represent the point at which an identifiable fashion studies emerged. This scholarship built upon investigation of fashion as a part of fa vie quotidienne (not yet 'popular culture') developed by theorists such as Lefebvre, Certeau and Barthes, and the essayist Perec, who explored the politics of everyday life in the 1950s and 1960s. A representative sample of this most important strand of 1970s and 1980s scholarship about fashion is represented in this anthology.
