Fashion Talks is a vibrant look at the politics of everyday style. Shira Tarrant and Marjorie Jolles bring together essays that cover topics such as lifestyle Lolitas, Hollywood baby bumps, haute couture hijab, gender fluidity, steampunk, and stripper shoes, and engage readers with accessible and thoughtful analyses of real-world issues. This collection explores whether style can shift the limiting boundaries of race, class, gender, and sexuality, while avoiding the traps with which it attempts to rein us in. Fashion Talks will appeal to cultural critics, industry insiders, mainstream readers, and academic experts who are curious about the role fashion plays in the struggles over identity, power, and the status quo.

An illuminating introduction to the expanding influence of fashion from the perspectives of design, technology, sustainability, and business Fashion matters for the economy, to society, and to each of us personally. Faster than anything else, what we wear tells the story of who we are—or who we want to be. It is the most immediate form of self-expression. Yet even as fashion touches the lives of each and every one of us, its influence and the vast creative industry that it supports can seem mysterious to outsiders. In Why Fashion Matters Frances Corner, Head of London College of Fashion, guides readers into the dizzying world of this rapidly expanding, increasingly global, always exciting industry. In provocative and intriguing entries, Corner teases out the glorious intricacies and contradictions of an industry that simultaneously values technology and craft; timeless style and fast fashion; the bespoke and the mass-market; consumption and sustainability; cold, hard numbers; and creative expression. From “Shop 'til We Drop” to “The White Shirt” to “The One Trillion Dollar Business” each entry offers a unique avenue into fashion and its impact, both positive and negative, on lives around the globe.

The Psychology of Fashion offers an insightful introduction to the exciting and dynamic world of fashion in relation to human behaviour, from how clothing can affect our cognitive processes to the way retail environments manipulate consumer behaviour. The book explores how fashion design can impact healthy body image, how psychology can inform a more sustainable perspective on the production and disposal of clothing, and why we develop certain shopping behaviours. With fashion imagery ever present in the streets, press and media, The Psychology of Fashion shows how fashion and psychology can make a positive difference to our lives.

: “Slave to Fashion offers hope of a fairer, more ethical world and gives the reader plenty of tools to navigate a challenging fashion system.”—Livia Firth There are over 35 million people trapped in modern slavery today—the largest number of slaves in modern history. This is fueled by the global demand for cheap labor—which is what makes the fast fashion industry work. Slave to Fashion is a highly accessible book which uses brilliant design, personal stories, and easy-to-grasp infographics to raise awareness among common brand consumers. Fair trade and sustainable fashion expert Safia Minney draws on her extensive knowledge and personal experience to call attention to the human hardship that goes hand-in-hand with producing our clothes, and highlights what governments, business leaders, and consumers can do to call time on this unnecessary suffering. The product of a successful crowdfunding campaign, Slave to Fashion celebrates those fighting for justice and the many initiatives that are taking place. It contains a practical toolkit that all consumers can use to demand change from the companies that produce our clothes. Safia Minney is a pioneer in ethical business. She developed the fashion industry’s first fair trade supply chains and has helped to create social and organic standards to improve the lives of thousands of economically marginalized people in the developing world. Minney now brings her expertise and experience to help businesses embrace sustainability and transparency in their operations and branding. She is the author of several acclaimed books, including Naked Fashion and Slow Fashion.

This book seeks to address and fill a puzzling omission in contemporary critical IR scholarship. Following on from the aesthetic turn in IR, critical and ‘postmodern’ IR has produced an impressive array of studies into movies, literature, music and art and the way these media produce, mediate, and represent international politics. By contrast, the proponents of the aesthetic turn have overlooked fashion as a source of knowledge about global politics. Yet stories about the political role of fashion abound in the news media. Margaret Thatcher used dress to define her political image, and more recently the fascination with Michelle Obama, Carla Bruni and other women in similar positions, and the discussions about the appropriateness of their wardrobes, regularly makes the news. In Sudan, a female writer and activist successfully challenged the government over her right to wear trousers in public and in Europe, the debate on women’s headscarves has politicised a garment item and turned it into a symbol of fundamentalism and oppression. In response, the contributors to this book investigate the politics of fashion from a variety of perspectives, addressing theoretical as well as empirical issues, establishing the critical study of fashion and its protagonists as a central contribution to the aesthetic turn in international politics. The politics of fashion go beyond these examples of the uses and abuses of textiles and fabrics for political purposes, extending into its very ‘grammar’ and vocabulary. This book will be a unique contribution to the field and will be of interest to students and scholars of international relations, critical IR theory and popular culture and world politics.

The book takes the reader through all the major steps of fashion portfolio creation. It features the main components of the design process from the identification of inspiration sources and fashion trends research to conceptualization of a complete fashion collection. The topics covered include mood/fabric boards development, creation of original and innovative textiles as well as fashion silhouettes and garment details development through extensive research, quick design sketching, fabric manipulation, and draping experimentation. Great original designs and illustrations by the author as well as design sketch samples by established designers are provided throughout. There are samples of sketchbooks from professional and emerging fashion artists. The book provides some insight from established fashion and accessories designers on the highlights and challenges of the creative process. It is a great professional reference for techniques in the portfolio development. A beautiful but practical book that provides useful techniques and helps the reader get inside the mind of the designer.

Few phenomena embody the notion of time as well as fashion. Fast-moving and rooted in the 'now', it's constantly creating its own past through the process of rapid style change. Uniquely poised between the past and the future, fashion's relationship with time is unorthodox. Rather than considering time in the conventional sense, this anthology explores three alternative ways to think about fashion and time: the first identifies the seasonal nature of fashion as an industry, and shows how this has impacted on workers and wearers alike. The second looks at fashion design as a ceaseless process of adaptation, reconstruction and recombination of motifs, in which nostalgia and revivals play their part. The third construes fashion's 'imaginary', with its capacity for fantasy and myth-making, as a form of alternate history that asks 'what if?' Within this framework, key classic texts are juxtaposed with lesser known ones, in an interdisciplinary approach that includes philosophy, history, literature, media and fashion design, ranging from the 18th century to the present. It will be of interest to anyone wishing to understand one of the most complex yet inescapable aspects of fashion, its relationship to time, and will be a critical resource for undergraduate and postgraduate students in the humanities and all those interested in fashion in all its creative, commercial and cultural aspects.