The Places and Spaces of Fashion, 1800-2007 brings together art, design, fashion, and a much neglected concern for its spatial realities. The spaces and places of fashion have often been overlooked in the writing of fashion history and visual culture. More often than not, however, these environments mitigate, control, inform, and enhance how fashion is experienced, performed, consumed, seen, exhibited, purchased, appreciated and of course displayed. Space, as this volume attempts to illustrate, is itself a representational strategy on par with and influencing the visibility and visuality of fashion. Innovative and challenging, the essays in this volume explore various physical and conceptual spaces, moving from physical environments to the two-dimensional with paintings, illustrations, and photographs to chart similarities, differences, and complex nuanced relationships between environments, fashion, identities, and visuality. The volume also navigates various sites (both permanent and temporary) of production, circulation, exhibition, consumption, and promotion of fashion that define meaning and knowledge about a culture or individual by providing for a bond between embodied consumers/spectators and fashion objects. The Places and Spaces of Fashion, 1800-2007 is a compelling project with a thematic, theoretical, and historiographic approach that is at once both focused yet far-reaching and original in its implications. The volume engages with questions attending to the 'modern condition' by seamlessly weaving interdisciplinary discussions of the visual with material culture to explore the spatial dimension(s) of fashion. Some of the essays explore new and exciting spaces while others offer compelling revisionary analyses of relatively known sources

About the Author

John Potvin is Assistant Professor of Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century European Art. He is the author of Boundaries and Intimacy: Material and Visual Cultures Beyond Male Bonding, 1880-1914 (Ashgate, December 2007) and co-editor of the forthcoming Collecting Subjects in Britain, 1700-1914: The Visual Meanings and Pleasures of Material Culture (Ashgate).

Reviews

'Full of rich and rigourous new research, it will be of interest tomany historians, with its valuable insights on the spatially located visuality, performance and display of fashion' - The Journal of Design History.

Book Information
ISBN 9780415873826
Author John Potvin
Format Paperback
Page Count 282
Imprint Routledge
Publisher Taylor & Francis Ltd
Weight(grams) 520g