Description
Book SynopsisAt its inception, the ‘Little Black Dress’ was radically modern: a masculine-inspired, anti-traditionalist female attire. Yet it has remained a wardrobe staple for almost a century, each new silhouette redressing gendered boundaries of fashion to reflect evolving ideals of beauty and sexuality. In attempting to reconcile the historical study of fashion in the West with the reality of a global fashion system of production, distribution and consumption, and the urgent demand for the industry to be more aware of its footfalls in our culture, Little Black Dress: A Radical Fashion widens the lens through which we interpret the colour black.
In this book, international scholars, curators and fashion writers explore how black’s paradoxical meanings have made the LBD simultaneously expressive of respect and rebellion, sophistication and dissident sexualities, piety and perversion. Bridging tradition and innovation, fashion and anti-fashion, the LBD emerges as a radical fashion for the 21st century.
Table of ContentsForeword by Dr Christopher Breward / Well-mannered Black?: Fashion, Femininity and Feminism by Georgina Ripley / Spiritual Black by Lynne Hume / Sublime Black: Perfection of Line and Technical Wizardry by Iain R Webb / Black Will Take Any Other Hue by Makoto Ishizeki / LBD(SM) by Fiona Jardine / Fashion, Technology and the LBD by Pamela A Parmal / The Transmodern Little Black Dress by Georgina Ripley / Bibliography / Index
