Sex and Suits: The Evolution of Modern Dress

Description

Since the dawn of western fashion in the Middle Ages, women's dress has never stopped evolving, yet menswear has seen far fewer style revolutions. At the centre of the male wardrobe is the suit: relatively unchanged since the 17th century, its cut and cloth suggest athleticism, seriousness, sexuality and strength - qualities which contrasted with the perceived superficiality and frivolity of female dress, and eventually led to the adoption of the suit into the female wardrobe where it remains to this day. In Sex and Suits brilliant essayist and art critic Anne Hollander charts the development of men's and women's fashion from their divergence in the medieval period to their convergence through to the late 20th century. Challenging the idea that the suit's success is merely down to its practicality, this trailblazing book argues that men have been fashion's true style-setters and that as women's fashion has taken on elements of men's style through tailoring, so men have reclaimed the embellishment and colour of past eras. First published in 1994 to great acclaim, this classic text is as fresh and provocative as ever and remains a must-read for students, scholars and anyone fascinated by the history of fashion and gender.

Anne Hollander was an independent scholar and critic whose work changed the way we look at fashion and art. A fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities and former president of PEN American Center, she was the author of several influential books on the subject of costume and fabric in art, including Seeing through Clothes, Sex and Suits and Fabric of Vision. She also published Moving Pictures about the influence of painting on cinema, and Feeding the Eye, a selection of essays. Her highly innovative books are rigorous, stylish, provocative and insightful.

Anne Hollander's Sex and Suits was, and remains, a major contribution to the study of fashion. * Valerie Steele, Director of the Museum at FIT, New York, US * Entrancing, vivacious...[a] dazzling, whirlwind account of Western costume. * John Updike, The New Yorker * Anne Hollander, who died in 2014, was the Ernst Gombrich of fashion history ... [This is] a confident survey of the field ... Her text is full of provocations, in particular the idea that women's fashion has historically always lagged behind men's. * London Review of Books * Hollander rides her theories like a surfer, and her wittiest prose retains the note of generosity that gives human curiosity its moral weight. * Diane Middlebrook, The Los Angeles Times * To fully appreciate the suit's aesthetic and erotic success, Hollander treats us to an unfailingly insightful, creative and provocative history of modern fashion. She maintains a rich cultural context while pondering the interplay between sex and the imagination, idealized gender roles and clothing, fashion's unreliability and irony, and the crucial roles the printing press and camera have played in Western fashion's global dominance. * Donna Seaman, Booklist * Hollander's clear, brisk style packs every paragraph with provocative ideas. What is the T-shirt but male underwear with an imprinted motto, a provisional tattoo? * Robert Taylor, Boston Globe * Iconoclastic, continually stimulating. * Publishers Weekly Review * Hollander's unique cadence remains as compelling as ever and her deployment of crisp phrasing is often rather witty - to achieve this whilst remaining unequivocally academic in one's discussion is no mean feat, and this is testament to her skill as an essayist. * Costume * Brilliant, funny ... [Sex and Suits is] an exuberant and upbeat story of the expression of sexual fantasy in dress ... a captivating book. * Martha C. Nussbaum, Philosophical Interventions * Examining the relationship between genders as represented through clothing from Medieval times to the 1990s, Sex and Suits by Anne Hollander has become a classic within the field of fashion studies. Though written two decades ago in 1994, the book is still extremely relevant today...an immensely informative and interesting read. * The Fashion Studies Journal *