Modernism à la Mode

Modernism à la Mode
Author: Elizabeth M. Sheehan
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 178
Release: 2018-10-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1501728164

Modernism à la Mode argues that fashion describes why and how literary modernism matters in its own historical moment and ours. Bringing together texts, textiles, and theories of dress, Elizabeth Sheehan shows that writers, including Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, W.E.B. Du Bois, Nella Larsen, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, turned to fashion to understand what their own stylized works could do in the context of global capital, systemic violence, and social transformation. Modernists engage with fashion as a mood, a set of material objects, and a target of critique, and, in doing so, anticipate and address contemporary debates centered on the uses of literature and literary criticism amidst the supposed crisis in the humanities. A modernist affect with a purpose, no less. By engaging modernism à la mode—that is, contingently, contextually, and in light of contemporary concerns—this book offers an alternative to the often-untenable distinctions between strong or weak, suspicious or reparative, and politically activist or quietist approaches to literature, which frame current debates about literary methodology. As fashion helps us to describe what modernist texts do, it enables us to do more with modernism as a form of inquiry, perception, and critique. Fashion and modernism are interwoven forms of inquiry, perception, and critique, writes Sheehan. It is fashion that puts the work of early twentieth-century writers in conversation with twenty-first century theories of emotion, materiality, animality, beauty, and history.

The Mechanical Smile

The Mechanical Smile
Author: Caroline Evans
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2013
Genre: Fashion shows
ISBN: 9780300189537

A superlative study of the roots of the modern fashion show In the early 20th century, the desire to see clothing in motion flourished on both sides of the Atlantic: models tangoed, slithered, swaggered, and undulated before customers in couture houses and department stores. The Mechanical Smile traces the history of the earliest fashion shows in France and the United States from their origins in the 1880s to 1929, situating them in the context of modernism and the rationalization of the body. Fashion shows came into being concurrently with film, and this book explores the connections between fashion and early cinema, which arguably functioned as what Walter Benjamin called "new velocities"--forces that altered the rhythms of modern life. Using significant new archival evidence, The Mechanical Smile shows how so-called "mannequin parades" employed the visual language of modernism to translate business and management methods into visual seduction. Caroline Evans, a leading fashion historian, argues for an expanded definition of modernism as both gestural and performative, drawing on literary and performance theory rather than relying on art and design history. The fashion show, Evans posits, is a singular nodal point where the disparate histories of commerce, modernism, gender, and the body converge.

Fashion and Modernism

Fashion and Modernism
Author: Louise Wallenberg
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 371
Release: 2018-11-01
Genre: Design
ISBN: 1350044512

Art and fashion have long gone hand in hand, but it was during the modernist period that fashion first gained equal value to – and took on the same aesthetic ideals as – painting, film, photography, dance, and literature. Combining high and low art forms, modernism turned fashion designers into artists and vice versa. Bringing together internationally renowned scholars across a range of disciplines, this vibrant volume explores the history and significance of the relationship between modernism and fashion and examines how the intimate connection between these fields remains evident today, with contemporary designers relating their work to art and artists problematizing fashion in their works. With chapters on a variety topics ranging from Russian constructionism and clothing to tango and fashion in the early 20th century, Fashion and Modernism is essential reading for students and scholars of fashion, dress history, and art history alike. Contributors: Patrizia Calefato, Caroline Evans, Ulrich Lehmann, Astrid Söderbergh Widding, Alessandra Vaccari, Olga Vainshtein, Sven-Olov Wallenstein

Modernism and Modernity in British Women’s Magazines

Modernism and Modernity in British Women’s Magazines
Author: Alice Wood
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 211
Release: 2020-05-12
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1351967398

This book explores responses to the strangeness and pleasures of modernism and modernity in four commercial British women’s magazines of the interwar period. Through extensive study of interwar Vogue (UK), Eve, Good Housekeeping (UK), and Harper’s Bazaar (UK), Wood uncovers how modernism was received and disseminated by these fashion and domestic periodicals and recovers experimental journalism and fiction within them by an array of canonical and marginalized writers, including Storm Jameson, Rose Macaulay, Gertrude Stein, and Virginia Woolf. The book’s analysis is attentive to text and image and to interactions between editorial, feature, and advertising material. Its detailed survey of these largely neglected magazines reveals how they situated radical aesthetics in relation to modernity’s broader new challenges, diversions, and opportunities for women, and how they approached high modernist art and literature through discourses of fashion and celebrity. Modernism and Modernity in British Women’s Magazines extends recent research into modernism’s circulation through diverse markets and publication outlets and adds to the substantial body of scholarship concerned with the relationship between modernism and popular culture. It demonstrates that commercial women’s magazines subversively disrupted and sustained contemporary hierarchies of high and low culture as well as actively participating in the construction of modernism’s public profile.

A Dialectical Journey through Fashion and Philosophy

A Dialectical Journey through Fashion and Philosophy
Author: Eun Jung Kang
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 192
Release: 2020-01-01
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9811508143

This book takes an in-depth look at the integration of fashion and philosophy. It challenges the deeply rooted prejudice or misconception that fashion is a field limited to body-oriented and appearance-related themes and practices. It also reveals that fashion is intermeshed with distinctively modern issues that belong to the realm of the mind as well as the body. In doing so, it refashions philosophy and philosophizes fashion, which ultimately amount to the same thing. The book argues that while the philosophization of fashion can give a clearer understanding of some esoteric areas of philosophy and fashion’s close connection to modern societies and politics, it also shows that philosophy can assist in redeeming fashion from the objective, bodily world, positioning it as an indispensable part of the humanities. This is because fashion manifests critical aspects of human culture in our time, and is an expression of the zeitgeist, which is interwoven with the unfolding of history. This book will be highly relevant to students and researchers in fashion studies who are looking for the theoretical underpinnings and insights for their own work. It will also be of keen interest to scholars in the field of philosophy who are seeking to apply philosophical concepts to both everyday life and our empirical world.

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Modernist Archives

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Modernist Archives
Author: Jamie Callison
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 417
Release: 2024-06-13
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1350450561

Providing a broad, definitive account of how the 'archival turn' in humanities scholarship has shaped modernist studies, this book also functions as an ongoing 'practitioner's toolkit' (including useful bibliographical resources) and a guide to avenues for future work. Archival work in modernist studies has revolutionised the discipline in the past two decades, fuelled by innovative and ambitious scholarly editing projects and a growing interest in fresh types of archival sources and evidence that can re-contextualise modernist writing. Several theoretical trends have prompted this development, including the focus on compositional process within genetic manuscript studies, the emphasis on book history, little magazines, and wider publishing contexts, and the emphasis on new material evidence and global and 'non-canonical' authors and networks within the 'New Modernist Studies'. This book provides a guide to the variety of new archival research that will point to fresh avenues and connect the methodologies and resources being developed across modernist studies. Offering a variety of single-author case studies on recent archival developments and editing projects, including Samuel Beckett, Hart Crane, H.D., James Joyce, Dorothy Richardson, May Sinclair and Virginia Woolf, it also offers a range of thematic essays that examine an array of underused sources as well as the challenges facing archival researchers of modernism

Fashion and Modernism

Fashion and Modernism
Author: Louise Wallenberg
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2018-11-01
Genre: Design
ISBN: 1350044504

Art and fashion have long gone hand in hand, but it was during the modernist period that fashion first gained equal value to – and took on the same aesthetic ideals as – painting, film, photography, dance, and literature. Combining high and low art forms, modernism turned fashion designers into artists and vice versa. Bringing together internationally renowned scholars across a range of disciplines, this vibrant volume explores the history and significance of the relationship between modernism and fashion and examines how the intimate connection between these fields remains evident today, with contemporary designers relating their work to art and artists problematizing fashion in their works. With chapters on a variety topics ranging from Russian constructionism and clothing to tango and fashion in the early 20th century, Fashion and Modernism is essential reading for students and scholars of fashion, dress history, and art history alike. Contributors: Patrizia Calefato, Caroline Evans, Ulrich Lehmann, Astrid Söderbergh Widding, Alessandra Vaccari, Olga Vainshtein, Sven-Olov Wallenstein

Marianne in the Market

Marianne in the Market
Author: Lisa Tiersten
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2001-09-20
Genre: History
ISBN: 0520925653

In the late nineteenth century, controversy over the social ramifications of the emerging consumer marketplace beset the industrialized nations of the West. In France, various commentators expressed concern that rampant commercialization threatened the republican ideal of civic-mindedness as well as the French reputation for good taste. The female bourgeois consumer was a particularly charged figure because she represented consumption run amok. Critics feared that the marketplace compromised her morality and aesthetic discernment, with dire repercussions for domestic life and public order. Marianne in the Market traces debates about the woman consumer to examine the complex encounter between the market and the republic in nineteenth-century France. It explores how agents of capitalism—advertisers, department store managers, fashion journalists, self-styled taste experts—addressed fears of consumerism through the forging of an aesthetics of the marketplace: a "marketplace modernism." In so doing, they constructed an image of the bourgeois woman as the solution to the problem of unrestrained, individualized, and irrational consumption. Commercial professionals used taste to civilize the market and to produce consumers who would preserve the French aesthetic patrimony. Tasteful consumption legitimized women’s presence in the urban public and reconciled their roles as consumers with their domestic and civic responsibilities. A fascinating case study, Marianne in the Market builds on a wide range of sources such as the feminine press, decorating handbooks, exposition reports, advertising materials, novels, and etiquette books. Lisa Tiersten draws on these materials to make the compelling argument that market professionals used the allure of aesthetically informed consumerism to promote new models of the female consumer and the market in keeping with Republican ideals.

Dressing Modern Frenchwomen

Dressing Modern Frenchwomen
Author: Mary Lynn Stewart
Publisher: JHU Press
Total Pages: 324
Release: 2020-03-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 1421429225

At a glance, high fashion and feminism seem unlikely partners. Between the First and Second World Wars, however, these forces combined femininity and modernity to create the new, modern French woman. In this engaging study, Mary Lynn Stewart reveals the fashion industry as an integral part of women's transition into modernity. Analyzing what female columnists in fashion magazines and popular women novelists wrote about the "new silhouette," Stewart shows how bourgeois women feminized the more severe, masculine images that elite designers promoted to create a hybrid form of modern that both emancipated women and celebrated their femininity. She delves into the intricacies of marketing the new clothes and the new image to middle-class women and examines the nuts and bolts of a changing industry—including textile production, relationships between suppliers and department stores, and privacy and intellectual property issues surrounding ready-to-wear couture designs. Dressing Modern Frenchwomen draws from thousands of magazine covers, advertisements, fashion columns, and features to uncover and untangle the fascinating relationships among the fashion industry, the development of modern marketing techniques, and the evolution of the modern woman as active, mobile, and liberated.