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Summary
Summary
From haute couture to hot pants, from glamour to grunge, the past 50 years have witnessed some revolutions in fashion. This survey of postwar fashion not only describes the great designers and their creations but also places trends in clothing within their social and cultural contexts.
Author Notes
Valerie Steele is chief curator and acting director, The Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology, State University of New York. She is founder and editor of Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body and Culture.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (2)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In this companion volume to an exhibit due to open in October at the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology, curator Steele (author of Art, Design, and Barbie) covers familiar information with a stylish, breezy tone. There is nothing wrong with the writing or organization of this book, but the content is hardly groundbreaking. Steele argues that "Many people mistakenly believe that the term `fashion' refers only to high fashion," although certainly most readers are by now aware that trends trickle up from the street as often as they trickle down from haute couture. Each century's trends are presented and then dutifully tied to the political currents of their eras. This means that the late 1940s marked both the birth of Christian Dior's "New Look" and the end of the war, and that the youthquake of the early 1960s was reflected in Mary Quant's mini-skirts and Yves Saint Laurent's "Beat Look" collection (including "a black jacket in crocodile skin trimmed with mink and worn with a black mink `crash helmet.'"). In the face of a lack of analysis, most of the fun to be had here lies simply in remembering what people wore (or refused to wear, although Steele rarely differentiates between what designers proposed and what actually sold), including a line of disco-inspired sparkling underwear in the 1970s and Gaultier's torpedo-breasted corsets in the 1980s. Illustrations galore (150, with 100 in color) help perk things up, but the recitation of wacky styles and blunt reporting of cultural trendsincluding the breathless pronouncement that "every time [Linda Evangelista] changed her hair color it made headlines"quickly loses interest. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Library Journal Review
This exhibition catalog accompanies respected cultural historian Steele's debut exhibit as chief curator of the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT). Steele (e.g., Women of Fashion, LJ 10/1/95) offers acute observations about the historic and cultural contexts of fashion trends and fads from 1947 to the present. Interwoven into the superbly written text is a valuable literature study on the subject. Chapters are aptly labeled: "Fashion After the War," "Couture and Conformity: The 1950s," "Youthquake," "Excess" (referring to the 1980s), and "Fin de Siècle" (about the accelerated 1990s). Best of all, readers are treated to over 65 photographs of some of the garments in the museum at FIT. This book should be required reading for students of 20th-century fashion, but it is so well written that lay readers will enjoy it too. Highly recommended.Therese Duzinkiewicz Baker, Western Kentucky Univ. Lib., Bowling Green (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
| Foreword | p. vi |
| Acknowledgments | p. vii |
| 1 The New Look: Fashion after the War | p. 1 |
| 2 Couture and Conformity: The 1950s | p. 17 |
| 3 Youthquake: The 1960s | p. 49 |
| 4 Anti-Fashion: The 1970s | p. 79 |
| 5 Excess: The 1980s | p. 109 |
| 6 Fin de siecle: The 1990s | p. 143 |
| Select Bibliography | p. 164 |
| Index | p. 166 |
