Elizabeth Wilson

Juliet Ash

Designed to be as internationally relevant as the fashion it discusses, Chic Thrills extends fashion theory beyond the interpretation of style, and shows how it relates to the economic realities and motivations of those who create the clothing we buy and wear. Among the issues the contributors address are: Feminism and the politics of fashion * The relationship of non-European cultures to Western fashion * Fashion and the negotiation of identity * Recent trends in fashion photography and the media representation of fashion * Industrial conditions, production constraints and the relationship of garment workers to the clothes they make * Playing with a different sex: fashion and the lesbian couple * Fascism and fashion: Paris haute couture under Nazi occupation * Fashion and the postmodern body.

A Fashion Reader

Chic Thrills

From nineteenth-century broad arrows and black and white stripes to twenty first-century orange jumpsuits, prison clothing has both mirrored and bolstered the power of penal institutions over prisoners' lives. Vividly illustrated and based on original research, including throughout the voices of the incarcerated, this book is a pioneering history and investigation of prison dress, which demystifies the experience of what it is like to be an imprisoned criminal. Juliet Ash takes the reader on a journey from the production of prison clothing to the bodies of its wearers. She uncovers a history characterized by waves of reform, sandwiched between regimes that use clothing as punishment and discovers how inmates use their dress to surmount, subvert or survive these punishment cultures. She reveals the hoods, the masks, and pink boxer shorts, near nakedness, even twenty first-century 'civvies' to be not just other types of uniform but political embodiments of the surveillance of everyday life.

Juliet Ash

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