Fashion, Desire, and Anxiety: Image and Morality in the 20th Century (2001)

By: Rebecca Arnold

Fashion, and the glossy magazines it inhabits, allow Western culture to dream. It permits a person to fantasize and to experiment with new identities. It flaunts glamour and success. Appearance becomes something to be perfected and admired.

These dreams and freedoms, Rebecca Arnold proposes, are contradictory. Fashion and its surrounding imagery elicit fear and anxiety in their consumers as well as pleasure. Fashion has come to incorporate the underside of modern life, with violence and decay becoming a dominant theme in clothing design and photography.

Arnold draws on diverse written sources to explore the complex nature of modern fashion. She discusses a range of key themes: how fashion uses and abuses the power of wealth; the alienating promotion of “good” taste; the power plays of sex and display; and how identities can be blurred to disguise and confuse. In order to unravel the contradictory emotions of desire and anxiety they provoke, she never loses sight of the historical and cultural contexts in which fashion designers and photographers perform.

Generously illustrated, Fashion, Desire and Anxiety focuses on the last thirty years, from photographic works of the 1970s to the beginning of the twenty-first century.

More Information

Description

Place New Brunswick, NJ
Publisher Rutgers University Press
Date 2001
# Of Pages 144
ISBN 978-0-8135-2903-5 978-0-8135-2904-2

About the author

About the author

Rebecca Arnold was educated at King’s College, London (BA Hons History, 1990), The Courtauld Institute of Art (MA History of Dress, 1993) and University College London (PhD, 2006). Before joining The Courtauld Institute of Art in 2009, she was a Research Fellow and Lecturer in the History of Design Department at the Royal College of Art and a Visiting Fellow at the Victoria and Albert Museum. In 2006, she was the first Guest Professor at the Centre for Fashion Studies at Stockholm University. In 2001, she set up and ran the BA (Hons) Fashion History and Theory at Central Saint Martin’s College of Art and Design.

Her current book project, Documenting Fashion: Modernity and Image in America, 1920-60 considers dress in relation to popular visual culture and through the lens of sensory theory, history of emotion, and memory studies.

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