Category: Annotated Bibliography

  • Ben Barry outlines the benefits of model diversity

    Can using different types of models benefit brands? : Culture – Elle Canada. Ben Barry gives a fascinating overview of his dissertation on diverse models in fashion advertising. Kudos to Elle Canada for publishing the piece.

  • Fashion as Communication

    ‘Everybody has to get dressed in the morning and go about the day’s business. What everybody wears to do this has taken different forms in the West for about seven hundred years and that is what fashion is’ (Hollander 1994:11). Cf. Fashion and Clothing

  • Fashion: A Very Short Introduction – Media in History and Ethics

    Rebecca Arnold’s Fashion: A Very Short Introduction highlights the history of fashion through the lenses of Designers, Art, Industry, Shopping, Ethics, and Globalization. Throughout the book,  I was struck by fashion’s very close relationship with media.  Arnold notes that designers use the media to brand themselves in a certain way, and then create the clothes…

  • Perfume Advertising: Manufacturing Desire

    My scent of choice: Miss Dior Chérie. I’ve been wearing it exclusively for a few years now and barely remember how that came to be. I had never seen a commercial for it nor was I accosted by an overeager salesperson and a spray bottom at my local mall. My mother had another Dior perfume…

  • Fashion: Philosophy for Everyone

    As women (and men) in academia, we’re given a set of both spoken and unspoken rules on what is appropriate.  Appropriate to discuss, to research, or even to question.  Fashion has remained firmly outside of that design. For philosophy and the humanities, fashion has been ignored “if not outright dismissed as vain and trivial” (Wolfendale…

  • Techno Fashion // Bradley Quinn

    As fashion designers begin using technology to inspire and shape their work, we can see the important impact cyber culture has on our bodies, fashion and the built environment within which we function. Bradley Quinn’s Techno Fashion explores a number of fashion designers whose work is impacted by technology both conceptually and aesthetically. It is…

  • Fresh Lipstick: Redressing Fashion and Feminism

    Fresh Lipstick: Redressing Fashion and Feminism: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. First off let me state that this is not a fashion book. Nor is it a beauty book. Nor, and you may find this surprising, is it a feminist manifesto. Still interested? Good. As the title suggests the author, Linda M. Scott, offers a fresh perspective…

  • The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women by Naomi Wolf

    Before I started reading The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women (Naomi Wolf, 1991) I was thinking: “oh great, another book that will tell me how women are influenced by magazines, big news”. But I’m glad to say I was mistaken.

  • Fashion: A Very Short Introduction by Rebecca Arnold

    Arnold, Rebecca. Fashion: A Very Short Introduction. Cambridge: Oxford UP, 2009. The title of this book is in no way misleading. It is, in fact, a very short introduction to the history of fashion. Arnold takes the reader on a helicopter ride through fashion’s past, present, and future, hovering far above specific instances to locate…