"Bringing Modernity Home" offers a retrospective view of the development of popular taste and the beginnings of a new phase in the rise of the consumer society in the post Second World War period. It traces the change to consumer-led design after a time of grim austerity and recovery from the war while the state and production considerations held sway when consumers "couldn't afford taste." The case studies of so-called frivolous items like the cocktail cabinet, the coffee table and the rise of DIY in the working-class homes of the "new towns" gives a flavor of the excitement and thrill they...

Dress and globalisation is the first work to survey dress around the world, drawing together issues of consumption, ethnicity, gender and the body, as well as anthropological accounts and studies of representation. It examines international western style dress, including jeans and business suits, headwear and hairdressing, ethnicity and so called 'ethnic chic', clothes for the tourist market, the politicisation of traditional dress, 'alternative' dressing, and t-shirts as temporary markers of identity. It also considers dress and environmental issues, touching on adventure gear, the 'green'...

This fascinating collection provides a chronologically arranged set of case studies looking at how interior design has constantly redefined itself as a manifestation of culture, from the eighteenth century to the present day. The book looks at the amateur activities of female 'home makers' in search of creative outlets and married couples seeking to modernise their homes, as well as the contributions of early professional (female) 'interior decorators', and later (male) 'interior designers'. It also considers the more anonymous role of commercial enterprises, such as hairdressing salons,...

Material relations tells the story of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century middle-class families by exploring the domestic spaces they inhabited and the material goods they prized. By opening the doors of the house, the book sheds new light on aspects of family life including love, marriage, sex, childhood and death.
Historians have argued that as the nineteenth century waned, domestic spaces became increasingly private. Material relations challenges this, contending that domestic space created a complex series of family intimacies.
Drawing upon novels, advice manuals and...

Surfaces are often held to be of lesser consequence than 'deeper' or more 'substantive' aspects of artworks and objects. Yet it is also possible to conceive of the surface in more positive terms: as a site where complex forces meet. Surfaces can be theorized as membranes, protective shells, sensitive skins, even thicknesses in their own right. The surface is not so much a barrier to content as an opportunity for encounter.
Surface tensions includes sixteen essays that explore this theoretically uncharted terrain. The subjects range widely: domestic maintenance; avant-garde fashion; the...

The Independent Group is now the subject of global scholarly interest, and this book, a sequel to The Independent Group: Modernism and Mass Culture in Britain, 1945-59, explores the Anglo-American phenomenon from a new perspective. The Group included fine artists Magda Cordell, Richard Hamilton, Nigel Henderson, Eduardo Paolozzi and William Turnbull; architects Alison and Peter Smithson, James Stirling and Colin St John Wilson; graphic designer Edward Wright; music producer Frank Cordell and writers Lawrence Alloway, Reyner Banham, John McHale and Toni del Renzio. This radical collective met...

This innovative volume explores how individuals understood production processes in new ways during the eighteenth century. It examines a series of different groups - consumers, retailers, designers, manufacturers and workers - to show how their means of perceiving production changed in this period. In doing so, it reorients current discussions of consumption and production to see them as interrelated entities. At the same time, it underscores the importance of materiality to understandings of eighteenth-century consumer culture. As such, it moves beyond taste, desire and novelty to reveal how...

Wood or stone, wax or silk - materials shaped the meaning of early modern art. Transformed and crafted from the matter of nature, art objects were the physical embodiment of both the inherent qualities of materials and the forces of culture that used and produced them. The making and marketing of art depended upon the manipulation of both exotic and everyday materials; and interest in materials and objects reached a peak in the years between 1250 and 1750, spurred on by expanding networks of global trade, nation-building, and scientific exploration.
Drawing on new research and models from...