Sanda Miller

Constantin Brancusi

"This book is a guide to using Art History's theory of iconography to interpret fashion imagery, thereby uncovering meanings related to society, class, culture and the history of dress"--

A Fashion Iconography

Images on the Page

Peter McNeil

Fashion is all around us, and so too is fashion journalism. Discussions of fashion proliferate in an ever-increasing range of media, from newspapers and magazines to tweets and TV programs. Fashion Journalism: History, Theory and Practice is an accessible, comprehensive guide to writing about fashion in any form, whether in style blogging, magazine interviews, news reportage or art reviews. Exploring what sets fashion journalism apart from other forms of journalistic writing, the book features a wide range of global fashion case studies, from Carmel Snow's reporting on Dior's 'New Look' to 1970s responses to Yves Saint Laurent, and Diana Vreeland's role as a fashion editor. Through a series of engaging exercises, you will learn how to find inspiration, carry out successful research, structure your work logically, use a style appropriate to your readership, and to make the leap from descriptive writing to informed analysis and criticism. Engaging and clearly written, Fashion Journalism examines how recent technological developments are shaping and driving fashion journalism, and delves into the theory and practice of writing about fashion.

History, Theory, and Practice

Fashion Journalism

Senior Lecturer in the History of Art Sanda Miller

Sanda Miller is the first Western European historian to have subjected Brancusi to exhaustive analysis: being Romanian by birth, she has a full knowledge of the literature and is able to bring to bear Romanian memoirs, literary texts, histories, and recent scholarship with confidence and to make a new range of knowledge accessible to western readers. The material on Brancusi's childhood and training both as a craftsman and fine artist at the School of Arts and Crafts in Craiova and the Academy of Fine Arts in Bucharest respectively, provides a new basis for the assessment of his work, after as well as before his arrival in Paris. Brancusi is accepted as a major figure in histories of twentieth-century sculpture. Where the problems of sculpture, craft and materials, of formalism and the avant-garde or of 'primitivism' in modernism are concerned, he will remain a major figure to be discussed. This is a substantial contribution to knowledge about Brancusi and his work which includes many illustrations never previously published.

A Survey of His Work

Fashion imagery has existed for hundreds of years and yet the methods used by scholars to understand it have remained mostly historical and descriptive. The belief informing these approaches may be that fashion imagery is designed for one purpose: to depict a garment and how to wear it. In this interdisciplinary book, Sanda Miller suggests a radical alternative to these well-practiced approaches, proposing that fashion imagery has stories to tell and meanings to uncover. The methodology she has developed is an iconography of fashion imagery, based on the same theory which has been key to the History of Art for centuries. Applying Panofsky's theory of iconography to illustrations from books, magazines and fashion plates, as well as fashion photography and even live fashion events, Miller uncovers three levels of meaning: descriptive, secondary (or conventional) and tertiary or 'symbolic'. In doing so, she answers questions such as who is the model; what did people wear and why; and how did people live? She proves that fashion imagery, far from being purely descriptive, is ripe with meaning and can be used to shed light on society, class, culture and the history of dress.

Acknowledged as one of the major sculptors and avant-garde artists of the twentieth century, Constantin Brancusi (1876–1957) was also one of the most elusive, despite his fame. His mysterious nature was not only due to his upbringing in Romania—which, at the time, was still regarded by much of Europe as a backward country haunted by vampires and werewolves—but also because Brancusi was aware that myth and an aura of otherness appealed to the public. His self-mythology remained intact until the publication of Brancusi in 1986 by Romanian artists Alexandre Istrati and Natalia Dumitresco, who made available a small selection of the archive of Brancusi’s correspondence. And in 2003, a comprehensive catalogue, which made the bulk of Brancusi’s private correspondence public for the first time, was published by the Centre Pompidou to accompany a retrospective on Brancusi’s work. In Constantin Brancusi, Sanda Miller employs these extensive new resources to better assess Brancusi’s life and work in relationship to each other, providing valuable and innovative insights into his relationships with friends, collectors, dealers and lovers. Miller’s perceptive book allows Brancusi to finally take his rightful place among the most important of the intellectual personalities who shaped twentieth-century modernism.

A concise and comprehensive student guide to fashion writing and criticism, including a wide range of case studies from Antiquity to the present day.

Sanda Miller

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