The book highlights how the signs of fashion showcase stories, hybridations, forms of feeling, from the classics of fashion in cinema, to fashion as cultural tradition in the global world, to digital media. Based on a strong socio-semiotic method (Barthes, The Language of Fashion is the main reference), the book crosses some of the main aspects of the contemporary culture of the clothed body: from time and space, to gender, to fashion as cultural translation, to the narratives included in the media convergence of our age. According to Jurji Lotman, fashion introduces the dynamic principle into seemingly inert spheres of the everyday. Fashion’s unexpected function of overturning received meaning is conveyed through its collocation within the dynamic storehouse of what Lotman calls the “sphere of the unpredictable.” In this horizon, the concept of fashion as a worldly system of sense (Benjamin) generates different “worlds” through its signs.

Vegans strive to lead a cruelty-free life, avoiding eating or using products that cause harm to animals. When it comes to clothes and fashion, that goal may appear even more difficult to achieve. This accessible guide explains how animal cruelty is embedded in fabric production, manufacturing, and marketing. Readers will discover how to make a personal checklist of their cruelty-free values and buy budget-friendly clothes that they can feel good about. Features include an inspirational section providing readers with numerous ideas for making their own cruelty-free garments and accessories, a sidebar on debunking topical Myths and Facts, and 10 Questions to Ask a Specialist.

This important book explores animal exploitation in the fashion industry. Drawing on a fascinating array of historical fashion images, the author argues that there is a hidden history of global impact on animals and the environment by the fashion world, from extinction to large-scale industrial confinement and killing. The book helps to understand why we are so drawn to animal materials in fashion, and what can be done to bring about change. This is a thoroughly researched and beautifully illustrated study that also celebrates emerging innovations that could replace the use of animals altogether in our clothing.

This book is a study of attitudes toward animals in early modern Western culture. Emphasizing the influence of anthropocentrism on attitudes toward animals, historian Nathaniel Wolloch traces the various ways in which animals were viewed, from predominantly anti-animal thinking to increasingly pro-animal sentiments and viewpoints. Wolloch devotes a chapter each to six major themes: early modern philosophical perspectives on animals till the end of the seventeenth century, pro-animal opinions in the eighteenth-century, the connection between attitudes toward animals and the early modern debate about the existence of extraterrestrial life, scientific modes of discussing animals, the role of animals in early modern anthropomorphic literature, and depictions of animals in seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish painting. He concludes his broad, interdisciplinary study by linking these historical trends to the modern discussion of animal rights and ecological issues.