A Well Fashioned Image

Fashion—the question of what to wear and how to wear it—is a centuries-old obsession. Beyond superficial concerns with personal appearance, the history of dress points to deep preoccupations surrounding the social order, national identity, and moral decency. Produced in conjunction with an exhibition at the David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art (running from October 23, 2001 through April 28, 2002), A Well-Fashioned Image investigates clothing and the representation of clothing from these various perspectives. This richly illustrated catalogue, the fourth in a series sponsored by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, features an introduction by co-curators Elizabeth Rodini, the Smart Museum's Mellon Projects Curator, and Professor Elissa B. Weaver of the University of Chicago's Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, which is followed by essays addressing the topic from a variety of perspectives. Also included are a substantial bibliography on the topic of costume in art and an exhibition checklist.

Fashioned Texts and Painted Books examines the folding fan's multiple roles in fin-de-siecle and early twentieth-century French literature. Focusing on the fan's identity as a symbol of feminine sexuality, as a collectible art object, and, especially, as an alternative book form well suited to the reception of poetic texts, the study highlights the fan's suitability as a substrate for verse, deriving from its myriad associations with coquetry and sex, flight, air, and breath. Close readings of Stephane Mallarme's eventails of the 1880s and 1890s and Paul Claudel's Cent phrases pour eventails (1927) consider both text and paratext as they underscore the significant visual interest of this poetry. Works in prose and in verse by Octave Uzanne, Guy de Maupassant, and Marcel Proust, along with fan leaves by Edgar Degas, Edouard Manet, Berthe Morisot, and Paul Gauguin, serve as points of comparison that deepen our understanding of the complex interplay of text and image that characterizes this occasional subgenre. Through its interrogation of the correspondences between form and content in fan poetry, this study demonstrates that the fan was, in addition to being a ubiquitous fashion accessory, a significant literary and art historical object straddling the boundary between East and West, past and present, and high and low art.

This edited volume showcases new examples - previously untold stories of images, photographers, publications, and institutions - partly unknown outside the Nordic countries. The authors examine the reasons for and implications of this underexposure, taking on a photographic metaphor. While simultaneously challenging previously taken-for-granted ideas of the center and periphery in this field, the book also widens the study of fashion photography. Notably, the hybridity of approaches may enrich future studies of fashion photography. In Fashioned in the North, fashion photography is viewed as a transnational phenomenon and a material object, as well as a medium that is part of a media system and a result of archival systems and history writings. Furthermore, the book displays how studies of fashion photography can be so much more than stories of a few names and iconic images or studies of individual and periodic style. Indeed, the study of fashion photography may be a prism through which we can uncover cultural, social, economic, and ideological aspects of society at present and in the past.

347 detailed — often humorous — cuts from rare turn-of-the-century sources depict men, women, children reading at desks, the beach, in libraries, under trees; writing with varied implements. Also spots of ornate fountain pens, inkwells, leather-bound books, more; plus gallery of 20 distinguished literary figures.

In archaic and classical Greece, statues played a constant role in people's religious, political, economic, aesthetic, and mental lives. Evidence of many kinds demonstrates that ancient Greeks thought about--and interacted with--statues in ways very different from our own. This book recovers ancient thinking about statues by approaching them through contemporary literary sources. It not only shows that ancient viewers conceived of images as more operative than aesthetic, but additionally reveals how poets and philosophers found in sculpture a practice ''good to think with.'' Deborah Tarn Steiner considers how Greek authors used images to ponder the relation of a copy to an original and of external appearance to inner reality. For these writers, a sculpture could straddle life and death, encode desire, or occasion reflection on their own act of producing a text. Many of the same sources also reveal how thinking about statues was reflected in the objects' everyday treatment. Viewing representations of gods and heroes as vessels hosting a living force, worshippers ritually washed, clothed, and fed them in order to elicit the numinous presence within. By reading the plastic and verbal sources together, this book offers new insights into classical texts while illuminating the practices surrounding the design, manufacture, and deployment of ancient images. Its argument that images are properly objects of cultural and social--rather than purely aesthetic--study will attract art historians, cultural historians, and anthropologists, as well as classicists.

The Mass Image situates the creation of the first photographically illustrated magazines within the social relations of the emerging popular culture of late Victorian London. It demonstrates how photomechanical reproduction allowed the illustrated press to envisage modern life on a much more intense scale than ever before.

Using his etchings and paintings as a "visual diary," the author takes the reader on a journey revealing his motivations and personal experiences at the time the work was produced. The paintings and etchings are illustrated in full colour, and span a period of little more than thirty years, (1975 to 2009). Interspersed between the illustrations are essays on Oils, Perspective, Pigments, Photography etc., which describe various discoveries and innovations that have affected the way artists express themselves. In the preface, Robin Wall traces scientific developments over the last two hundred years that have profoundly altered the way we think about ourselves and our relationship to the universe. He argues that this paradigm shift should be a strong motivation for artists of all stripes, and could result in a new form of Romanticism. In this regard he examines the original Romantic movement and what he sees as a far sighted vision amongst some of its members.

Academy Award-winning screenwriter of the film American Beauty and creator of the HBO series Six Feet Under, Alan Ball has consistently probed the cultural forces shaping gender, sexuality, and death in the United States. Through gritty dialogue and edgy humor, Ball centers much of his social critique on the illusory promises of the American Dream. For many of his characters, a belief in the American Dream--including idealized notions of the family, heterosexual norms, and the acceptance of prescribed gender roles--proves stifling and self-destructive. This is the first book to explore Ball's writings for theater, television and film, with an emphasis on his best-known work. These essays offer insight into both the captivating and problematic dimensions of Ball's work, while drawing connections among his diverse writings. An interview with Ball is included.

"Fashion has always sought to celebrate nature - from sumptuous silks and floral patterns, to the spectacular creations of designers such as Alexander McQueen and Christian Dior, the two have long been entwined. Yet this reverence is sometimes combined with a damaging need for raw materials. From the seventeenth century to the present day, Fashioned from Nature examines our dependence on the natural world and the devastating effect of certain trends, as seen in the demand for ivory, fur, skins and exotic feathers. Today, intense consumerism and fast fashion have a different impact on the world around us, and this book discusses the need for a more responsible fashion cycle. But which has the greater environmental impact - a leather handbag or a white cotton t-shirt? Consider the effects of land clearance, insecticides and water consumption - not to mention washing after every wear - and the answer may not be completely clear. Fascinating and beautifully illustrated, this book will stimulate an important and timely debate." -- provided by publisher.