Thinking Through Fashion: A Guide to Key Theorists

Description

Learning how to think through fashion is both exciting and challenging, being dependent on one's ability to critically engage with an array of theories and concepts. This is the first book designed to accompany readers through the process of thinking through fashion. It aims to help them grasp both the relevance of social and cultural theory to fashion, dress, and material culture and, conversely, the relevance of those fields to social and cultural theory. It does so by offering a guide through the work of selected major thinkers, introducing their concepts and ideas. Each chapter is written by an expert contributor and is devoted to a key thinker, capturing the significance of their thought to the understanding of the field of fashion, while also assessing the importance of this field for a critical engagement with these thinkers' ideas.This is a guide and reference for students and scholars in the fields of fashion, dress and material culture, the creative industries, sociology, cultural history, design and cultural studies.

Agnes Rocamora is Reader in Social and Cultural Studies at the London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London. She is the author of Fashioning the City: Paris, Fashion and the Media (2009) and a co-editor of The Handbook of Fashion Studies (2013) and of Fashion Media: Past and Present (2013).Anneke Smelik is Professor of Visual Culture on the Katrien van Munster chair at the Radboud University, Nijmegen, Netherlands. Her books include Delft Blue to Denim Blue: Dutch Fashion (2016), Performing Memory in Art and Popular Culture (2013) and And the Mirror Cracked: Feminist Cinema and Film Theory (1998).

[Thinking Through Fashion] would certainly prove useful to anyone making their first foray into the world of academic theory, and also for those needing to refresh their memories on the various theoretical approaches key to the study of western fashion. * The Journal of Dress History * An important pedagogical contribution to the field of fashion studies ... Thinking Through Fashion offers a very accessible guide as to how to use social and cultural theory to analyze fashion in its 'many manifestations'. * Fashion Theory * While there's no shortage of useful fashion studies readers and reference books for fashion studies students ... none have gone so far as to systematically provide suggestions for the application of key western theorists and philosophers to fashion studies so comprehensibly and concisely. * The Fashion Studies Journal *