Carol Tulloch

This Time Its Personal

Fashion Theory takes as its starting point a definition of 'fashion' as the cultural construction of the embodied identity. It provides an international and interdisciplinary forum for the analysis of cultural phenomena ranging from foot binding to fashion advertising. All articles have solid theoretical underpinnings and are based on original research. Fashion Theory is covered by the following abstracting/indexing services: Abstracts in Anthropology; AOI Anthropological Index Online; ARTbibliographies Modern; British Humanities Index; DAAI Design and Applied Arts Index; IBR International Bibliography of Book Reviews of Scholarly Literature in the Humanities and Social Sciences; IBSS International Bibliography of the Social Sciences; IBZ International Bibliography of Periodical Literature on the Humanities and Social Sciences; ISI Arts and Humanities Citation Index; Scopus; Sociological Abstracts

Special Issue: African Diaspora

Fashion Theory Volume 14 Issue 3

Special Issue on Fashion and Photography Looking American: Louise Dahl-Wolfe's Fashion Photographs of the 1930s and 1940s Considers the influential fashion photography of Louise Dahl-Wolfe in Harper's Bazaar and Vogue and how it evoked myths of America. Rebecca Arnold (Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design) The Politics of the First: The Emergence of the Black Model in the Civil Rights Era Janice M. Cheddie (Goldsmiths College, University of London) On the Turn: Millenial Bodies and the Meaning of Time in Andrea Giacobbe's Fashion Photography Traces the influence of new media, including digital photography, upon the world of fashion photography and its impact on how the world is depicted and conceived. Paul Jobling (University of Brighton) Bloody Jumpers: Benetton and the Mechanics of Cultural Exclusion Explores Bennetton's controversial ‘Shock of Reality' campaign including AIDS/HIV ads, during the early 1990s. Paul Antick (University of Middlesex) "Put in Just for Pictures": Fashion Editorial and the Composite Image in Nova, 1965-1975 A timely look at the treatment of fashion within the recently re-launched Nova magazine and its relationship with the original version. Alice Beard (Kingston University)

The Journal of Dress, Body and Culture

Fashion Theory: Volume 6, Issue 1

'Black Style' looks at the huge variety to be seen in black dress, hair and accessories, whether in West Africa, Jamaica, or reinvented on the streets of the United States and Great Britain.

Black Style

It is broadly recognized that black style had a clear and profound influence on the history of dress in the twentieth century, with black culture and fashion having long been defined as 'cool'. Yet despite this high profile, in-depth explorations of the culture and history of style and dress in the African diaspora are a relatively recent area of enquiry. The Birth of Cool asserts that 'cool' is seen as an arbiter of presence, and relates how both iconic and 'ordinary' black individuals and groups have marked out their lives through the styling of their bodies. Focusing on counter- and sub-cultural contexts, this book investigates the role of dress in the creation and assertion of black identity. From the gardenia corsage worn by Billie Holiday to the work-wear of female African-Jamaican market traders, through to the home-dressmaking of black Britons in the 1960s, and the meaning of a polo-neck jumper as depicted in a 1934 self-portrait by African-American artist Malvin Gray Johnson, this study looks at the ways in which the diaspora experience is expressed through self-image. Spanning the late nineteenth century to the modern day, the book draws on ready-made and homemade fashion, photographs, paintings and films, published and unpublished biographies and letters from Britain, Jamaica, South Africa, and the United States to consider how personal style statements reflect issues of racial and cultural difference. The Birth of Cool is a powerful exploration of how style and dress both initiate and confirm change, and the ways in which they expresses identity and resistance in black culture.

Style Narratives of the African Diaspora

The Birth of Cool

Stephen Wilson

Dave Beech

Malcolm Quinn

Michael Lehnert

This book offers an interdisciplinary analysis of the social practice of taste in the wake of Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology of taste. For the first time, this book unites sociologists and other social scientists with artists and curators, art theorists and art educators, and art, design and cultural historians who engage with the practice of taste as it relates to encounters with art, cultural institutions and the practices of everyday life, in national and transnational contexts. The volume is divided into four sections. The first section on ‘Taste and art’, shows how art practice was drawn into the sphere of ‘good taste’, contrasting this with a post-conceptualist critique that offers a challenge to the social functions of good taste through an encounter with art. The next section on ‘Taste making and the museum’ examines the challenges and changing social, political and organisational dynamics propelling museums beyond the terms of a supposedly universal institution and language of taste. The third section of the book, ‘Taste after Bourdieu in Japan’ offers a case study of the challenges to the cross-cultural transmission and local reproduction of ‘good taste’, exemplified by the complex cultural context of Japan. The final section on ‘Taste, the home and everyday life’ juxtaposes the analysis of the reproduction of inequality and alienation through taste, with arguments on how the legacy of ideas of ‘good taste’ have extended the possibilities of experience and sharpened our consciousness of identity. As the first book to bring together arts practitioners and theorists with sociologists and other social scientists to examine the legacy and continuing validity of Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology of taste, this publication engages with the opportunities and problems involved in understanding the social value and the cultural dispositions of taste ‘after Bourdieu’. It does so at a moment when the practice of taste is being radically changed by the global expansion of cultural choices, and the emergence of deploying impersonal algorithms as solutions to cultural and creative decision-making.

Carol Tulloch

Books

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