Fashion, Desire and Anxiety: Image and Morality in the Twentieth Century / Edition 1

by Rebecca Arnold

Overview

Fashion, and the glossy magazines it inhabits, allow Western culture to dream. It permits a person to fantasize and to experiment with new identities. It flaunts glamour and success. Appearance becomes something to be perfected and admired.

These dreams and freedoms, Rebecca Arnold proposes, are contradictory. Fashion and its surrounding imagery elicit fear and anxiety in their consumers as well as pleasure. Fashion has come to incorporate the underside of modern life, with violence and decay becoming a dominant theme in clothing design and photography.

Arnold draws on diverse written sources to explore the complex nature of modern fashion. She discusses a range of key themes: how fashion uses and abuses the power of wealth; the alienating promotion of "good" taste; the power plays of sex and display; and how identities can be blurred to disguise and confuse. In order to unravel the contradictory emotions of desire and anxiety they provoke, she never loses sight of the historical and cultural contexts in which fashion designers and photographers perform.

Generously illustrated, Fashion, Desire and Anxiety focuses on the last thirty years, from photographic works of the 1970s to the beginning of the twenty-first century.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780813529042
Publisher:	Rutgers University Press
Publication date:	03/01/2001
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	160
Product dimensions:	7.50(w) x 9.50(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

REBECCA ARNOLD is a senior lecturer in cultural studies, fashion, history and theory at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London. 

Table of Contents

	List of illustrations	vii
	Acknowledgements	ix
	Introduction	xiii
1	Status, Power and Display	1
	Excess	4
	Cruelty and Power	12
	Simplicity	17
	Imperfection	22
	Eco	26
2	Violence and Provocation	32
	Ultra Style/Ultra Violence	34
	Gangsters	37
	Gangstas	40
	Skinheads	42
	Punks	45
	Heroin Chic	48
	Decadence and Decay	55
3	The Eroticised Body	63
	Underwear as Outerwear	66
	Eroticism	71
	Fetish	77
	The Brutalised Body	80
	Flesh	89
	Skin	95
4	Gender and Subversion	99
	New Woman	102
	Dressing Up: Woman	106
	Dressing Up: Man	111
	Unisex	118
	Androgyny	122
	Conclusion	125
	Notes	127
	Bibliography: Books	134
	Journals	136
	Newspapers and Magazines	137
	Filmography	139
	Index	141

Editorial Reviews

Rebecca Arnold presents a fast-paced yet comprehensive study that provides surprise connections between fashion and the wide culture on every page.

coeditor of Footnotes: On Shoes - Shari Benstock

Arnold (cultural studies and fashion history and theory, Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, London) draws from diverse sources to discuss such themes as how fashion uses and abuses the power of wealth, the alienating promotion of good taste, the power plays of sex and display, and how identities can be blurred to disguise and confuse. She focuses on photographs from the 1970s through the end of the century. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

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