Bloomsbury Fashion Central

This chapter examines kimono in printed texts, both writtenwritten and visual. This is important because printed text is largely responsible for the creation of trends and their diffusion among groups of consumers; thus it plays a key role in the fashion cycle. As Chapters 1–3 show, the written word is a key source for finding out about kimono in the past, as even when fabric or garments remain, these alone cannot enlighten us about their usage. Novels, trading tradingdocumentsdocuments, and patt

Byron, George Gordon Lord“Prometheus”Schlegel, FriedrichLucindeFor with her is everything in nature is animate and inspired, and often remember fondly how she at Wharton, EdithThe House of Mirththe age of no more than one year old she saw and felt a puppetpuppet for the first time. A heavenly smile blossomed upon her face and she pressed a heart-felt kiss on its painted wooden lips.

‘On street style photographydescription ofthe Street’ is the title of photographer Bill Cunningham, BillCunningham’s long-running weekly column (and now web video series) in the Sunday style section of the New York Times. It was also the title of Amy Arbus’ photo column in the Village Voice throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Midway through the first decade of the new millennium, Scott Schuman began using it as a heading for his posts on The Sartorialist, TheSartorialist website, followed by a ‘…’, t

It was Monday, 26 March 2012, a windy and unseasonably cold afternoon in Center City, Philadelphia. I was standing on the corner of Walnut and 18th Street, a backpack swung over my shoulders, a Panasonic Lumix GF-1 micro-four thirds camera dangling from my neck. My head ached. My teeth were grinding with caffeine. And my eyes were dry and strained from overuse, darting continually back and forth, as I assessed the outfit of every person passing by. I remember being self-conscious about what I was

That was what the Chief Strategy Officer for a New York-based department store told me – without any hint of irony – as we chatted, four months before their local launch, in the private pavilion of a hotel rooftop lounge in Philadelphia. It was mid-afternoon in early summer, over two years into my street style project, and this was the first time I had met face-to-face with brand representatives from the fashion industry. It wouldn’t be the last. There was a round conference table in the centre o

In a Fashion Weekspectacle ofnow infamous New York Times T Magazine editorial entitled ‘The Circus of Fashion’, veteran fashion journalist Suzy Menkes, SuzyMenkes reminiscences about the relative austerity that used to define her industry. ‘We were once described as “black crows”, she writes, ‘ – us fashion folk gathered outside an abandoned, crumbling downtown building in a uniform of Comme des Garçons or Yohji Yamamoto, YohjiYamamoto. “Whose funeral is it?” passers-by would whisper with a mix o

Let’s go back to that day in late March of 2012, where we started this book, my first time out ‘on the street’ as a street style blogger. I had brought my camera and a stack of photo release forms, a notebook for jotting down thoughts, and an iPhone for posting Twitter updates to a non-existent set of followers. I was anxious and over-caffeinated, with little idea of where to go and even less of what to do when I got there. So I went to the first location that popped into my head, South Street. S

What does street Philadelphiastylestyle photography ‘reveal’ about its subjects? What does it show us about who they are, where they are from, and the times they are living in? What hidden meanings does it unearth from the clothes they wear and the styles they embody? What kinds of anthropological knowledge, in other words, can we glean from a street style photograph? If the realism of street style photography is largely performative, a construct of the conventions photographers employ (see Chapt

In October 2012, after six years of posting his photographs online, Gunnar Hämmerle, the veteran street style blogger behind the Munich-based StyleClicker.net, made a decision. He he’d had enough of Fashion Week self-promotion, of style stars in brand name dresses lingering outside runway shows. He he’d had enough of the grind and the buzz of the street style hype machine, the competition among photographers over the same image, the regurgitation of the same clean, high fashion aesthetic. It was

With the visual arts of the 1920s and 1930s anchored by black peoples, we can recollect and reimagine this twentieth-century moment when Harlem was not only “in vogue”, or “on the minds” of a complacent few, but also a geo-political metaphor for modernity and an icon for an increasingly complex black diasporal presence in the world.

[P]eople are always speculating—why am I as I am? To understand that of any person, his whole life, from birth must be reviewed. All of our experiences fuse into our personality. Everything that ever happened to us is an ingredient.

higgler (market trader): “A Jamaican Lady” postcardcritical draw ofLike many other African-Jamaicans featured on postcards during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, this woman’s personal details are lost to us. There is no way of knowing her age. She could be anywhere between forty and sixty. What is suggested that if she was closer to sixty, she was an ex-slave, and if nearer to forty, then her parents were enslaved. Either way, this woman had a direct link to the pre-emancipation

This chapter examines representations of Afro-Brazilian dress from nineteenth-century Brazil with the aim of examining the traje de crioula’s origin, formation and influence. The research includes comparative analysis of a broad range of nineteenth-century visual representations and written descriptions alongside analysis of surviving garments currently held in museum collections, and their subsequent interpretation and display. To present a case study for this chapter, a sample of four images is