Fashion and Celebrity Culture

Description

The interrelationship between fashion and celebrity is now a salient and pervasive feature of the media world. This accessible text presents the first in-depth study of the phenomenon, assessing the degree to which celebrity culture has reshaped the fashion system. Fashion and Celebrity Culture critically examines the history of this relationship from its growth in the 19th century to its mutation during the twentieth century to the dramatic changes that have befallen it in the last two decades. It addresses the fashion-celebrity nexus as it plays itself out across mainstream cinema, television and music and in the celebrity status of a range of designers, models and artists. It explores the strategies that have enabled visual culture to recast itself in the new climate of celebrity obsession, popular culture and the art world to respond adaptively to its insistent pressures. With its engaging analysis and case studies from Lillian Gish to Louis Vuitton to Lady Gaga, Fashion and Celebrity Culture is of major interest to students of fashion, media studies, film, television studies and popular culture, and anyone with an interest in this global phenomenon.

Pamela Church Gibson is Reader in Film & Cultural Studies at the London College of Fashion, Vice-Chair of the European Popular Culture Association, and Principal Editor of the refereed journal Film, Fashion & Consumption. She has published extensively on film, fashion, gender, and heritage over the last 25 years. Her books include Dirty Looks: Women, Power, Pornography (BFI, 1993), The Oxford Guide to Film Studies (1998, with John Hill), Fashion Cultures (2001, with Stella Bruzzi), More Dirty Looks: Gender, Power, Pornography (BFI, 2004), Fashion and Celebrity Culture (Bloomsbury, 2012) and Fashion Cultures Revisited: Theories, Explorations, Analysis (2013).

Fashion and Celebrity Culture explores the relationship between fashion and style that underpins contemporary celebrity culture. By tracing particular contemporary stylistic shifts as they have intersected with media technologies - photography, cinema, magazines and music - Pamela Church Gibson engages with broad social and cultural transformations in the field of popular culture. Focusing on fashion and its representation, Church Gibson offers a useful point of entry for understanding the processes and meanings that characterize celebrity culture today. * Vicki Karaminas, Associate Professor and Associate Head of the School of Design, University of Technology, Sydney, Australia * Pamela Church Gibson shows that while cinema has, from the early twentieth century forward, influenced fashion trends and often determined who would become a star, the intersection of celebrity, fashion, and high art that has developed in the last twenty years requires us to look "sideways" across the film-media-art-fashion-culture landscape...This is a very smart book in all senses. * Cynthia Baron, Associate Professor in the Department of Theatre and Film, Affiliated Faculty in the American Studies Program, Bowling Green State University, U.S. *