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                                              FASHION

Fashion in clothes, accessories and other items has long been a part of popular culture, and a key factor pushing consumerism. But in recent decades the connections between fashion and other realms of pop culture have become much stronger. Celebrities in film, TV, sport and other arenas increasingly find themselves on the cover of fashion magazines, in fashion ads, and in fashioning their own brands. From the red carpets of award shows to the runways of design shows, people famous for other areas of pop culture have depended interest in and the impact of fashion, for better and for worse.

On the worse side, obsession with things beyond one's economic reach, and with bodies that are impossible for ordinary humans (and most models whose bodies are often photoshopped) to achieve, can be devastatingly unhealthy. Some important efforts in recent years have sought to address the often horrendous conditions in the textile production, as well as using fashion to raise awareness of important social issues like HIV/AIDS, breast cancer, eating disorders and teen suicide.

             Parody of Obsession perfume for menfemale Obsession ad parody

Featured Sites

  • Clean Clothes Campaign. International effort to improve working conditions in the garment industry.
  • The Vogue Archive Every issue of Vogue, arguably the world's most famous fashion mag, since 1892. Full access requires a subscription but significant parts can be viewed for free.
  • United Students Against Sweatshops. Deals with college apparel production and much more with regard to injustice in the global labor system.

A Sampling of Online Articles/Videos

Fashion Sites & Online Magazines

Some Appropriately Lovely Fashion Websites 

Bibliography

[Few topics on popular culture can be adequately researched on the web alone. These reading suggestions are designed as beginning points for further offline study.]

Barthes, Roland. The Fashion System. London: Jonathan Cape, 1983.
Classic, complicated study of how the world of high fashion industry uses “fabric texts” and words to create an abstract world of fashionableness that must at once always change and always stay the same.
Bruzzi Stella, and, Patricia Church Gibson, eds. Fashion Cultures: Theories, Explorations, and Analysis. London; New York: Routledge, 2000.
Excellent collection of essays on all aspects of the social meanings of fashion. Gives a fine sense of the range of approaches currently used to study the cultural functions of fashion in many different contexts.
Craik, Jennifer. The Face of Fashion: Cultural Studies in Fashion. London; New York: Routledge, 1993.
Provides an excellent overview of a cultural studies approach to the meanings of fashion.
Crane, Diana. Fashion and Its Social Agendas: Class, Gender, and Identity in Clothing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.
From 19th century France to modern America, traces how fashion has shaped and been shaped by changes in class, and gender relations.
Entwistle, Joanne. The Fashioned Body: Fashion, Dress, and Modern Social Theory. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000.
Rich study of historical and contemporary fashion, and the ways that fashion constructs identity.
Malossi, Giannino, ed. Material Man: Masculinity, Sexuality, Style. New York: H.N. Abrams, 2000.
Wide-ranging collection of essays on the cultural meanings of men's dress across history, cultures, class, and race.
Rabinowitz, Paula, and Cristina Giorgelli, eds. Accessorizing the Body: Habits of Being, Vol 1. University of Minnesota Press, 2011.
---. Exchanging Clothes: Habits of Being, Vol. 2. University of Minnesota Press, 2012.
---. Fashioning the 19th Century: Habits of Being, Vol. 3. University of Minnesota Press, 2012.
---. Extravagances: Habits of Being, Vol. 4 University of Minnesota Press, 2015.
Rabinowitz and Giorgelli have gathered together four superb volumes, offering a rich set of social analyses of fashion historically in and in the present.
Ross, Andrew. No Sweat: Fashion, Free Trade and the Rights of Garment Workers. New York: Verso, 1997.
Excellent collection of articles on the exploitation often involved in the production of high and popular fashion.