Over the past ten years the study of dress history has finally achieved academic respectability. This book shows how the fields of dress history and dress studies are now benefitting from the adoption of new multi-disciplinary approaches and outlines the full range of these approaches which draw on material culture, ethnography, and cultural studies. Raises a series of frank and fresh issues surrounding approaches to the history of dress, including analysis of the academic gender and subject divides that have riven it in the past. Comprehensive, engaging and trenchant, this will become the...

This illustrated survey of 600 years of fashion investigates its cultural and social meanings from medieval Europe to 20th-century America. It provides a guide to the changes in style and taste, and challenges existing fashion histories, showing that clothes have always played a pivotal role in defining a sense of identity and society, especially when concerned with sexual and body politics. With a chronological structure, each chapter focuses on both male and female fashion of a specific period, covering its fascinating developments. It discusses: andrognous dressing; body piercing; fabrics,...

Interiors of Empire uses the methods of design history and material culture studies to analyse the domestic and public interiors of the British and local middle class during the heyday of the British Raj. It contrasts representations of that space within contemporary discourse with analysis of historical evidence, the varying uses of such space, and relevant social practices.
Through detailed discussion of these texts, spaces, objects and practices, this study locates the domestic interiors and public spaces of empire in the history of the British colonisation of India. The book discusses...

Representations of British motoring provides important new insights into the established discourses of British motoring. Based on the patterns of representation that have mediated between the trade, owners and society, particularly the myths and realities generated by the advertising campaigns and motoring journals, it identifies the landmarks of change and innovation. It is not about great images as such, although some are, but particular attention has been directed towards the creative intervention of the artist-illustrators.
Part One emphasises the critical significance of the emerging...

In this groundbreaking reassessment of the conventional understanding of a cohesive 'Arts and Crafts movement' in Britain, Imogen Hart argues that a sophisticated mode of looking at decorative art developed in England during the second half of the nineteenth century.
Bringing to light a significant number of little-known visual and textual sources, Arts and Crafts Objects insists that the history of British design between the 1830s and the 1910s is more complex and interwoven than concepts of clearly differentiated 'movements' allow for.
Reinvesting the objects with the original...

Despite the recent interests of economic and art historians in the workings of the market, we still know remarkably little about the everyday context for the exchange of objects and the meaning of demand in the lives of individuals in the Renaissance. Nor do we have much sense of the relationship between the creation and purchase of works of art and the production, buying and selling of other types of objects in Italy during this period. The material Renaissance addresses these issues of economic and social life. It develops the analysis of demand, supply and exchange first proposed by...

Ideal homes investigates the tastes and aspirations of the suburban communities that emerged in Britain after the First World War. It explores how new class and gender identities were forged through the architecture and decoration of the home. This edition includes a chapter on researching the history of your own house. -- .