Be as in love with your jeans, sweatpants, or flannels as you want, it’s hard to refute the sumptuous feel of a finely tailored suit—as well as the statement of power that comes with it. For over a century the suit has dominated wardrobes, its simple form making it the go-to attire for boardrooms, churches, or cocktail bars—anywhere one wants to make an impression. But this ubiquity has allowed us to take the suit’s history for granted, and its complex construction, symbolic power, and many shifting meanings have been lost to all but the most devout sartorialists. In The Suit, Christopher Breward unstitches the story of our most familiar garment. He shows how its emergence at the end of the seventeenth century reflects important political rivalries and the rise of modern democratic society. He follows the development of technologies in the textile industry and shows how they converge on the suit as an ideal template of modern fashion, which he follows across the globe—to South and East Asia especially—where the suit became an icon of Western civilization. The quintessential emblem of conformity and the status quo, the suit ironically became, as Breward unveils, the perfect vehicle for artists, musicians, and social revolutionaries to symbolically undermine hegemonic culture, twisting and tearing the suit into political statements. Looking at the suit’s adoption by women, Breward goes on to discuss the ways it signals and engages gender. He closes by looking at the suit’s apparent decline—woe the tyranny of business casual!—and questioning its survival in the twenty-first century. Beautifully illustrated and written with the authority a Zegna or Armani itself commands, The Suit offers new perspectives on this familiar—yet special—garment.

Do you remember trying to solve the Rubik's cube whilst dressed in your He-Man picture pyjamas? Did you try to make 'cool' sound effects with your mouth like Jones from Police Academy? Or maybe you swooned over Scott and Charlene's (aka Jason and Kylie's) wedding of the year? If that sounds like you, there's no mistaking you were a child of the eighties. Rev up your DeLorean, switch on the Flux Capacitor and take a cruise back through the decade that made you the person you are today. This amusing and entertaining collection of reminiscences will jog the memories of all who grew up in the same decade where greed was good, mullets were cool and white dog poo littered the streets.

Give the unexpected a chanceThat's the advice Chloë gets from her stepfather before she heads off to Florida to spend the summer with her aunt Bernadette. It turns out to be excellent advice, because everything about Bernadette is unexpected: her job driving a food service wagon, her big, slobbery dog, her Rollerblading skill, her unorthodox way of teaching Chloë to swim. But nothing is as unexpected as the war that erupts when the other drivers start wearing T-back swimsuits to work, and some community leaders mount a protest against the skimpy suits. Bernadette is caught in the middle of the controversy...and what starts as an innocent game for Chloë may just make things worse.

Traces the history of Western shirts, describing how the fashion has changed throughout time, explaining what to look for when collecting Western shirts, and listing more than 240 Western shirt labels.