Fashion, Desire and Anxiety: Image and Morality in the Twentieth Century (Fashion & Popular Culture)
Rebecca Arnold | 2001-03-02 00:00:00 | I.B.Tauris | 192 | Fashion
This text argues that fashion and the imagery surrounding it give us a vision of Western culture that is both enticing and alienating, flaunting capitalism's euphoric emblems of glamour and success but also representing the underside of modern life. In the 1970s, photographers like Guy Bourdin and Helmut Newton set models against backdrops of tarnished glamour; in the 1990s Alexander McQueen and John Galliano created decadent femmes fatales whose sexual allure was equally tempting and threatening. Rebecca Arnold exlores the complex nature of modern fashion, attempting to unravel the contradictory emotions of desire and anxiety that it provokes.
Reviews
With quick-paced, beautiful prose, Arnold distills, illuminates, and reveals the violence and decay which has become the dominant theme of end of the Century high-fashion. Generously illustrated and neatly referenced, she examines how power is wielded through fashion; how fashion blurs and disguises; and, most importantly, how it gives expression to the desires and anxieties of a buying public overwhelmed by a kind of creeping brutality. Never losing sight of historical and cultural contexts, she nevertheless delights in making her point by the exquisite examination of a detail. In a word, remarkable!
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