Hair: Styling, Culture and Fashion

Description

Hair: Styling, Culture and Fashion explores the social importance of hair, wherever it grows, explaining the cultural significance of hair and hairiness, and presenting a new critical engagement with hair and its stories, histories, performances and rituals. From heads, legs and underarms, to wigs and beards, and everything in between, the presentation, manipulation and daily experience of human hair plays a central and dynamic role within fashion, self-expression and the creation of social identity. The book's diverse range of cross-cultural essays encompasses the study of hair in fashion, film, art, history, literature, performance and consumer culture. Offering an accessible mix of visual analysis, cultural commentary and critical theory, Hair: Styling, Culture and Fashion will appeal to all those interested in the presentation and analysis of cultural identity and the body.

Geraldine Biddle-Perry is Lecturer, London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London. Sarah Cheang is Senior Lecturer, London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London.

This work provides an intriguing, interdisciplinary, multifaceted kaleidoscope focused on the universality of hair and its relationship to culture. These studies cover a wide spectrum, such as Hundu ritual tonsuring, African combing, salon styling, Islamic shaving, and aristocratic wigging. Overall, they provide a new lens for understanding the human condition and identity, both the exotic and personal. * B. B. Chico, CHOICE Magazine *