Colors in Fashion

Book Overview

Color speaks a powerful cultural language, conveying political, sexual, and economic messages that, throughout history, have revealed how we relate to ourselves and our world. This ground-breaking compilation is the first to investigate how color in fashionable and ceremonial dress has played a significant social role, indicating acceptance and exclusion, convention and subversion.

From the use of white in pioneering feminism to the penchant for black in post-war France, and from mystical scarlet broadcloth to the horrors of arsenic-laden green fashion, this publication demonstrates that color in dress is never straightforward. Divided into four parts - solidarity, power, innovation, and desire - each section highlights the often violent, emotional histories of color in dress across geographical, temporal and cultural boundaries. Underlying today's relaxed attitude to color lies a chromatic complexity that speaks of wars, migrations and economics.

Bringing together cutting-edge chapters from leading scholars, it is essential reading for students of fashion, textiles, design, cultural studies and art history.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1350077402
• ISBN13: 9781350077409
• Release Date: July 2018
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
• Length: 256 Pages