Images on the Page: A Fashion Iconography

Description

Fashion imagery has existed for hundreds of years and yet the methods used by scholars to understand it have remained mostly historical and descriptive. The belief informing these approaches may be that fashion imagery is designed for one purpose: to depict a garment and how to wear it. In this interdisciplinary book, Sanda Miller suggests a radical alternative to these well-practiced approaches, proposing that fashion imagery has stories to tell and meanings to uncover. The methodology she has developed is an iconography of fashion imagery, based on the same theory which has been key to the History of Art for centuries. Applying Panofsky's theory of iconography to illustrations from books, magazines and fashion plates, as well as fashion photography and even live fashion events, Miller uncovers three levels of meaning: descriptive, secondary (or conventional) and tertiary or 'symbolic'. In doing so, she answers questions such as who is the model; what did people wear and why; and how did people live? She proves that fashion imagery, far from being purely descriptive, is ripe with meaning and can be used to shed light on society, class, culture and the history of dress.

Sanda Miller was, until her untimely death in 2020, a research fellow at Southampton Solent University, UK and visiting lecturer at the Marangoni Institute, London, UK and the Milan Fashion Institute, Italy. She is the co-author, with Peter McNeil, of Fashion Journalism (Bloomsbury, 2018) and Fashion Writing and Criticism (Bloomsbury, 2014).