Short description:

The essays in this collection explore various physical and conceptual spaces, moving from physical environments to the two-dimensional spaces of paintings, illustrations, and photographs, to chart similarities, differences, and complex nuanced relationships between environments, fashion, identities, and visuality.

Long description:

The Places and Spaces of Fashion, 1800-2007 brings together art, design, fashion, and a much neglected concern for its spatial realities. The spaces and places of fashion have often been overlooked in the writing of fashion history and visual culture. More often than not, however, these environments mitigate, control, inform, and enhance how fashion is experienced, performed, consumed, seen, exhibited, purchased, appreciated and of course displayed. Space, as this volume attempts to illustrate, is itself a representational strategy on par with and influencing the visibility and visuality of fashion. Innovative and challenging, the essays in this volume explore various physical and conceptual spaces, moving from physical environments to the two-dimensional with paintings, illustrations, and photographs to chart similarities, differences, and complex nuanced relationships between environments, fashion, identities, and visuality. The volume also navigates various sites (both permanent and temporary) of production, circulation, exhibition, consumption, and promotion of fashion that define meaning and knowledge about a culture or individual by providing for a bond between embodied consumers/spectators and fashion objects. The Places and Spaces of Fashion, 1800-2007 is a compelling project with a thematic, theoretical, and historiographic approach that is at once both focused yet far-reaching and original in its implications. The volume engages with questions attending to the ?modern condition? by seamlessly weaving interdisciplinary discussions of the visual with material culture to explore the spatial dimension(s) of fashion. Some of the essays explore new and exciting spaces while others offer compelling revisionary analyses of relatively known sources

Table of Contents:

List of Figures

Introduction: Inserting Fashion into Space

John Potvin

Part I: Picturing Fashion/Fashionable Pictures

1. Tracking Fashions: Risking It All at the Hippodrome de Longchamp

Heidi Brevik-Zender

2. Framing the Victorians: Photography, Fashion and Identity

Margaret Denny

3. On the Golden Stairs: The Spectacle of the Victorian Woman in White

Anne Anderson

4. Maurice de Rothschild?s "Remembrances of Things Past": Costume Obsession and Decadence, the Collection of a Belle Époque Dandy

Christopher Bedford

Part II: Cultures of Display

5. Fashion?s Chameleons: Camouflage, "Conspicuousness" and Gendered Display during WWI

Allison Matthews David

6. Making the Princeton Man: Collegiate Clothing and Campus Culture, 1900-1920

Deidre Clemente

7. Elegance and Spectacle in Berlin: The Gerson Fashion Store and the Rise of the Modern Fashion Show

Mila Ganeva

8. The City Boutique: Milan and the Spaces of Fashion

Francesca Muscau

9. Libertine Acts: Fashion and Furniture

Peter McNeil

Part III: Window Dressing and Boutique Culture

10. Dressing Rooms: Women, Fashion and the Department Store

Louisa Iarocci

11. The Logic of the Mannequin: Shop Windows and the Realist Novel

Vanessa Osborne

12. Allure of the Silent Beauties: Mannequins and Display in America, 1935-1970

Emily Klug

13. "A House that is Made of Hats": The Lilly Daché Building 1937?1968

Rebecca Jumper Matheson

14. From "Paradise" to Cyberspace: The Revival of the Bourgeois Marketplace

Elyssa Dimant

15. Armani/Architecture: The Timelessness and Textures of Space

John Potvin

Notes on Contributors

Index