By Bonnie English
Contents
Preface xix
Acknowledgements xxi
Introduction 1
1 The Interplay of Commerce and Culture
before the First World War 5
The Rise of Haute Couture 5
The Rise of Consumerism 11
The Interplay of Commerce and Culture 14
The Art of Fashion Advertising 24
2 The Democratization of Fashion: Machine Age Aesthetics 29
Flooding the American Market: Reproductions and Fakes 29
Coco Chanel 32
3 Framing Fashion: The Artists Who Made Clothes 44
Modernist Abstract Design 44
Delaunay: Cubism 45
Stepanova and Popova: Russian Constructivism 49
Schiaparelli: Surrealism 51
Balenciaga: Organic Modernism 58
Viktor & Rolf: Neo-Dadaism 60
Martin Margiela: Postmodernist Deconstruction 62
Hussein Chalayan: Techno-design 64
4 Fashioning the American Body 66
The Home of Ready-to-Wear: Seventh Avenue, New York 66
Menswear: Shirts 69
A Fashion Icon: Levi’s Jeans 70
Decades of Dominance: American Dress in Hollywood Film 72
American Conservatism: The Designer/Stylist—Lauren, Klein and Karan 76
Global Conglomerates 82
5 Postmodernism and Fashion 85
A Cultural Contextualization 85
Postmodernism in Fashion and Art 91
Popular Culture and Pastiche: Quant, Courrèges, Cardin,
Saint Laurent and Ashley 93
The T-shirt: A Blank Canvas 103
Disposable Fashion 106
Youth Codes: The Hippie Movement 108
6 Anti-Fashion 111
The Deviance of Fashion 111
Punk Fashion: Rhodes and Westwood 113
Fashion as Ideology: Benetton, Moschino and Gaultier 118
Street Style 121
7 Japanese Conceptual Fashion 125
Issey Miyake, Yohji Yamamoto and Rei Kawakubo 125
The Aesthetics of Poverty 126
A Cultural Heritage 131
Textile Design 132
Conceptualization 134
Harajuku Street Fashion 139
8 Global Practices—1980s Onwards 141
The Death of Haute Couture? 141
LVMH: The Super Syndicate 143
Branding: The Designer as Product 144
Perfume: A Licence to Make Money 148
Fashion and Philanthropy 149
Fashion as Installation 150
9 Post-2000: Global Recession and Ideological Confl ict 152
A Shift in the Balance of Power 152
The Twenty-First-Century Image of Modern Womanhood 154
Beauty and the Beast: Fashion Noir 155
The Rise of Menswear 159
10 The Changing Fashion Market in the Late Twentieth
and Twenty-First Centuries 162
Marketing and Promotion 162
E-Marketing and Designer Web Sites 163
Reinventing the Shopping Experience 167
New Retailing Networks 169
Luxury Heritage Branding 173
Internationalizing Fashion 175
The New Media: Blogs and Social Networking 178
11 Eco-Fashion, Sustainability and Ethics 182
Green as the New Black 182
More Than Just a Marketing Strategy? 183
The Environmental Footprint 185
Eco-Designers 189
Ethical Concerns 192
12 Looking Ahead: The Emergence of Asian
and Indian Fashion Design Industries 196
China: Building an Infrastructure 196
India: The Old and the New 206
Conclusion 212
Notes 217
Bibliography 227
Index 239
Preface
Yes, it is bigger and better! This book now encompasses a broad overview of 150 years of fashion and provides an excellent foundation for students of all ages. Being adopted as a textbook by the world’s leading fashion schools and institutions, this version adds a detailed and up-to-date look at fashion over the past ten years.
The four new chapters and additions of A Cultural History of Fashion in the 20th and 21st Centuries: From the Catwalk to the Sidewalk look closely at the key issues facing fashion designers and the fashion industry globally since the turn of the second millennium. It provides a comprehensive overview of changes that have resulted from sociopolitical upheavals, economic downturns and a growing social consciousness of the role that industry plays in the world around us. It considers the impact of ecofashion, e-commerce, social networking and the emerging Asian markets upon business sustainability and enterprise. It reinforces the words of Coco Chanel: ‘A fashion that does not reach the streets is not a fashion.’ I hope you will enjoy this updated version.
Introduction
The history of fashion has a thousand stories to tell—stories built on myths and fairy tales; descriptive portraits of heroic men and gracious ladies; social histories locked in time. Fanciful images abound with glass slippers, cloaks shot through with threads of gold and silver, gossamer veils and pussycat bows. While fashion trends can be amusing, and seemingly light-hearted, throughout history fashion has also been forced to bow to imposing political, social and economic change. Stylistic change in both fashion and art multiplied at an ever-increasing pace, especially in the twentieth century, and the observer must seriously consider how fashion has been, and continues to be, embedded in the cultural fabric of society.
A Cultural History of Fashion in the 20th and 21st Centuries discusses how fashion refl ects the essence of its society, how it can be moulded by many forces, such as art, music, politics, or advertising media. We can step back in history or step forward into the future by merely changing what we wear. We broadcast our views about our society, its politics, its environmental concerns or its social issues through dress.
The more we learn about the history of fashion, the more we realize the nature of its complexity. ‘Fashion makes the world go round’—a hackneyed cliché but, perhaps, quite true in both commercial and cultural terms. The intercontextual relationships that exist among designer fashions, popular culture, big business, high-tech production and the multimedia world of television promotion, Web site sales and electronic journalistic publications will be discussed and analysed in this study of twentiethcentury fashion. While this book can only touch upon fashion’s interdisciplinary character, it will highlight similarities that it has shared with other visual arts practice over the last 150 years. This book will attempt to unravel the com-plications and contradictions behind stylistic changes in order to chart the cultural history of modern fashion. The recognition of fashion design as a justifi able part of culture has been illustrated in recent years by the rise of the celebrity designer, the increased number of blockbuster fashion exhibitions held in key international museums and the proliferation of academic fashion texts published which underline the interdisciplinary connections between the applied arts, design, fi ne art, fi lm and the fashion industry.
By providing a sociohistorical review of major trends that have emerged since the late nineteenth century, A Cultural History of Fashion in the 20th and 21st Centuries: From the Catwalk to the Sidewalk will consider the signifi cant role that both haute couture and prêt-à-porter designers have played in the interpretation of the fashions of their day.