Description
Book SynopsisPlaces Woolfs writing in the context of sartorial practice from the Victorian period to the 1930sBringing together studies in fashion, body culture and modernism, these 6 chapters place Woolfs writing in the context of contemporary European fashions, sartorial practices and projects of dress reform. Drawing on theories of dress and fashion from Thomas Carlyle to Walter Benjamin, Wyndham Lewis and J.C. Flugel, the book explores the modernist fascination with clothes as objects, signs, things, and embodied practice.Clothes facilitate explorations in modern materialism by, for instance, informing surrealist attempts to think the materiality of things outside the system of commodities and their fetishisation. Woolfs work as a cultural analyst and writer of fiction provides illuminating illustrations of all of these aspects, ''thinking through clothes'' in representations of the present, investigations of the archives of the past, and projections for the future.
Trade ReviewKoppen's work sets out an elegant and complex argument ! Highly innovative, wide-ranging, meticulously written and carefully argued. Routledge ABES
Table of ContentsList of illustrations; Abbreviations; Acknowledgements; Preface; 1. Modern Clothes-Consciousness; 2. From Symbolism in Loose Robes to the Figure of the Androgyne; 3. Fashion and Literary Modernity; 4. Modernism Against Fashion; 5. Civilised Minds, Fashioned Bodies, and the Nude Future; 6. Hats and Veils: Texere in the Age of Rupture; Bibliography; Index.
