We began this week by giving away 3 copies of Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu’s new book, The Beautiful Generation: Asian Americans and the Cultural Economy of Fashion (now available for sale at the Duke University Press website) and followed up our First Ever Promotional Giveaway by announcing the publication of our companion essays on war and fashion. And so to end this literary week, we give you a list of fashion articles and books we love (beyond those already mentioned).
Regular readers of Threadbared will not be surprised to find that the texts we’ve chosen are not traditional fashion studies. Rather than an emphasis on the history of textiles and design, these texts reflect our interest in the social, cultural, and political contexts of fashion. This list, in particular, is organized around the intersections of race and class in fashion. I hope it’ll be useful to many of you – and as always, feel free to add to the list!
- Anne Anlin Cheng. “Wounded Beauty: An Exploratory Essay on Race, Feminism, and the Aesthetic Question,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 19.2 (2000): 191-217.
- Gilles Lipovetsky. The Empire of Fashion: Dressing Modern Democracy (Princeton University Press, 2002).
- Jennifer Craik. The Face of Fashion: Cultural Studies in Fashion (Routledge, 1994).
- Kobena Mercer. “Black Hair/Style Politics” in New Formations (1987).
- Marianne Conroy. “Discount Dreams: Factory Outlet Malls, Consumption, and the Performance of Middle-Class Identity,” Social Text 54 (Spring 1998): 63-83.
- Michelle Habell-Pallan. “Soy Punkera, Y Que?”: Sexuality, Translocality and Punk in Los Angeles and Beyond in Loca Motion: The Travels of Chicana and Latina Popular Culture (New York University Press, 2005).
- Nan Enstad. Ladies of Labor, Girls of Adventure: Working Women, Popular Culture, and Labor Politics at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (Columbia University Press, 1999).
- Nirmal Puwar. “Multicultural Fashion . . . Stirrings of Another Sense of Aesthetics and Memory,” Feminist Review 71.1 (2002): 63-87.
- Norma Rantisi. “The Ascendance of New York Fashion,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 28.1 (2004): 86-106.
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Addendum: We just discovered that the focus of the Readers’ Forum in a recent issue of English Studies in Canada 35.2-3 (2009) is “Academic Fashion” and moreover, that Threadbared was given high praise by participants – see especially the Introduction and Zwicker’s essay! (Woot! Canada!!) Similar to the Feminist Currents section of Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies that asked readers “Do Clothes Make the Woman?”, ESC asks Canada-based scholars to consider the look and practice of fashion in academia. The result is a series of 6 short essays, available online.
- Cecily Devereux and Michael O’Driscoll. “Introduction: Academic Fashion.”
- Heather Zwicker. “Academic Fashion: An Oxymoron?”
- Christopher Keep. “Academic Fashion: System and Practice.”
- Benjamin Lefebvre. “Plaid Shirts in My Closet.”
- Lucas Crawford. “Re-Fashioning the Architectonics of Gender.”
- Nicola Nixon. “Smarty Pants.”
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You are both SO AWESOME. Thank you so much for posting this. I’m doing a visual sociology presentation at the Midwest Sociological Society annual meeting on ethnicity and sexuality in personal style blogs. I always need more references.
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