Description
Book SynopsisFashion imagery has existed for hundreds of years and yet the methods used by scholars to understand it have remained mostly historical and descriptive. The belief informing these approaches may be that fashion imagery is designed for one purpose: to depict a garment and how to wear it. In this interdisciplinary book, Sanda Miller suggests a radical alternative to these well-practiced approaches, proposing that fashion imagery has stories to tell and meanings to uncover. The methodology she has developed is an iconography of fashion imagery, based on the same theory which has been key to the History of Art for centuries. Applying Panofsky's theory of iconography to illustrations from books, magazines and fashion plates, as well as fashion photography and even live fashion events, Miller uncovers three levels of meaning: descriptive, secondary (or conventional) and tertiary or symbolic'. In doing so, she answers questions such as who is the model; what did people wear and why; and how
Trade ReviewThis highly interdisciplinary and erudite publication successfully presents an innovative analysis of fashion illustration ... the author manages to shed a new light not only on dress history, but on social and cultural history as well. * The Journal of Dress History *
Table of ContentsList of Illustrations Foreword, by Peter McNeil Acknowledgements 1: Introduction: (A new tool for the fashion image: iconography) 2: Renaissance books of clothes 3: The seventeenth century: A new profession: the gentleman journalist writing for Le Mercure galant 4: The eighteenth century: from the fashion doll to the fashion plate 5: Capturing modernity in nineteenth century France and England 6: Modernism - Fashion and art; is fashion art? - The photographed image on the page - The fashion show: fashion as ‘spectacle’ Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index
