Synopses & Reviews
As Oscar Wilde once wrote, “Fashion is a form of ugliness so absolutely unbearable that we have to alter it every six months.” And yet it serves to make us beautiful, or at least make us feel beautiful. In this book, Mari Grinde Arntzen asks how and why this is—how can fashion simultaneously attract us to its glamour and repel us with its superficiality and how being called “fashionable” can be at once a compliment and an insult.
Arntzen guides us through the major figures and brands of today’s fashion industry, showing how they shape us and in turn why we love to be shaped by them. She examines both everyday, affordable “fast fashion” brands, as well as the luxury market, to show how fashion commands a powerful influence on every socioeconomic level of our society. Stepping into our closets with us, she thinks about what happens when we get dressed: why fashion can make us feel powerful, beautiful, and original at the same time that it forces us into conformity. Stripping off the layers of the world’s fifth largest industry, garment by garment, she holds fashion up as a phenomenon, business, and art, exploring the questions it forces us to ask about the body, image, celebrity, and self-obsession.
Ultimately, Arntzen asks the most direct question: what is fashion? How has it taken such a powerful hold on the world, forever propelling us toward its concepts of beauty?
Synopsis
Fashion is a gigantic global industry, generating some three hundred billion dollars in revenue every year, and playing a significant role in the economic, political, cultural and social lives of a vast international audience. Despite this, and perhaps in part because of its prevalence in the media, it is often denigrated as trivial and superficial, as a sign of vanity and narcissism. Written by a highly regarded authority on twentieth-century fashion, this Very Short Introduction offer a wide-ranging and revealing look at fashion that discusses everything from production and design, to couture and retailing, to the wider role of fashion in society. This lively book illuminates the structure of the fashion industry and the range of professionals involved in its creation, and it provides cogent insight into its historical, social and cultural contexts. It also sheds light on how fashion has developed, while raising questions about its ethical and controversial aspects, such as the use of fur, exploitative trading, and poor working conditions for laborers.
Synopsis
As Oscar Wilde once wrote, “Fashion is a form of ugliness so absolutely unbearable that we have to alter it every six months.” And yet it serves to make us beautiful, or at least make us feel beautiful. In this book Mari Grinde Arntzen asks how and why this is—how can we be both enthralled by the fashion world, but at the same time appalled by the politics and practices of the garment industry? Why do we have such a love-hate relationship with fashion?
Arntzen guides us through the major figures and brands of todays fashion system, showing how they shape us and in turn why we love to be shaped by them. She focuses on everyday, affordable “fast fashion” brands as well as the luxury market, to show how both ends of the fashion industry exert a powerful force in our lives. As she argues, the world of fashion is both a dictatorship and a democracy that directs our shopping habits as well as our appearance. In this book she peels off the layers of the worlds fifth largest industry, garment by garment, to reveal fashion as a phenomenon, a business, and an art. What is fashion, what role does it play in a global system of adornment, and why do we beautify ourselves to death? She also looks at questions of body- and self-image, and celebrity- and self-obsession. Grinde Arntzen, a journalist who writes about fashion and visual culture, is both disturbed by its influence yet sympathetic to our desire—however ambivalent—to be stylish, smart, or trendy.
About the Author
Mari Grinde Arntzen is a journalist who writes for
Aftenposten and
Dagens Næringsliv and teaches at the School of Fashion Industry in Oslo, Norway.
Kerri Pierce is a translator specializing in Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, and German. Her translations include Mela Hartwigs
Am I a Redundant Human Being?; Kjersti Skomsvolds
The Faster I Walk, The Smaller I Am; and Lars Svendsens
A Philosophy of Freedom, the last also published by Reaktion Books. She lives in Pittsford, New York.
Table of Contents
Introduction
1. Human Beings
2. The Democracy
3. Dictatorship
4. The Brain
5. The Future
References