Fashion, Agency, and Empowerment: Performing Agency, Following Script

Description

Fashion has always been strongly linked with the politics of gender and equality. In this global and interdisciplinary collection, leading authors explore the relationships between the dressed body, fashion, sex, and power, with an emphasis on the role of dress in both reinforcing and challenging social norms. Covering a range of geographic and social contexts, the book explores the role of fashion in empowering both individuals and groups to create transformation and change. Taking us from the performance of black dandyism through stylized hats, to the use of challenging dance forms and male-inspired dress by female South African dancers to express independence and equality, to ways in which recent Bond Girls have challenged traditional gender binaries, the book provides a crucial entry point into discussions of fashion as an empowerment strategy. Fashion, Agency, and Empowerment encourages the reader to critically examine the cultural and social impact of sexual objectification, as well as to consider personal and shared narratives of self-objectification and repression. With chapters ranging from the iconic self-fashioning of Princess Diana to a discussion of sex, power, and cultural constructions of masculinity, Fashion, Agency, and Empowerment provides crucial insights into global fashion, political structures, and social life.

Annette Lynch is the Director of the School of Applied Human Sciences and a professor of Textiles and Apparel at the University of Northern Iowa, USA. Katalin Medvedev is a professor at the University of Georgia, USA.

Lynch and Medvedev have given their readers a 'fresh look' into the fashion of the 21st century. Their book reflects the zeitgeist and the importance of diversity, taking readers on journeys of race, ethnicity, gender, class and most importantly style. The text relates the significance of today's cultural shifts and how we are moving into a new era reflecting the influence of global fashion. -- Joseph H. Hancock II, Drexel University, Philadelphia, USA The overarching framework provided by Lynch and Medvedev in this volume is effective in addressing critical topics such as differences in gender socialization, fashion as challenge and empowerment, dress and power structures, and objectification and self-objectification in personal and group narratives ... [A] must-read for those who wish to understand the nuances of the relationship of fashionable dress to sex and power structures. -- Marilyn DeLong, College of Design, University of Minnesota, USA