Fashion in American Life

Hazel Clark, Lauren Downing Peters, Hazel Clark, Lauren Downing Peters

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN:
  9781350331921
• eBook ISBN:
  9781350331952
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Design
• Subtopic: Fashion Design

An original contribution to fashion studies, Fashion in American Life challenges existing approaches to fashion in America by considering who 'makes' fashion-when, where, and how. Avoiding the usual emphasis on the 'history of fashion' which perpetuates the myth of fashion designers, and New York, as the originators of American fashion, this exploration of the everyday allows us to see American fashion as a form of agency, self-identification, creative engagement, and politics.

Moving away from the well-trodden accounts of fashion designers and the dominance of New York, much of the fashion uncovered has been under-represented in previous accounts. Through contemporary and historical research, authors challenge the nature of both 'fashion' and 'America' by addressing the many complexities of a nation whose people have diverse histories and cultures, including stories and experiences that have been forgotten, marginalized and left out of the fashion 'canon'.

Race, gender, ethnicity, and class are employed as critical lenses to shed new light on how fashion might be defined and addressed within America (as a country, but not as a series of United States), with case studies looking at First Nations, Latinx and African American dress. The intellectual framing of the volume, and the methods and case studies included, also present tactics that can be applied to other contexts, making this book about revisiting 'fashion' more widely, not just in America. Fashion in American Life makes a unique contribution to the literature of fashion studies, fashion history, cultural studies, and beyond.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Fashion in American Life
• Section One: Refashioning the Everyday
• 1 Sovereignty Every Day: Mobilizing Indigenous Fashion from the Northwest Coast
• 2 Haoles in Hawaiian Shirts
• 3 “Smart Togs for Action”: Everyday Clothes for Rural Women in Texas in the 1950s
• 4 Examining the Ordinary: Mourning Adornment and Black Death
• Section Two: Revisiting the Everyday
• 5 Rags: The Birth of Personal Style in Print
• 6 Playing Seminole Indian: The Cultural Appropriation of Seminole Men’s Fashion
• 7 Working from the Periphery: The National Association of Fashion and Accessories Designers (NAFAD) and the Promotion of Black Fashion
• 8 Primitivizing Accessories: “Slave Jewelry” and the Construction of White Femininity in 1920s America
• Section Three: Recovering the Everyday
• 9 Extra-ordinary Americans: Oral History, Workwear, and the US Postal Service
• 10 1970s Fashion and Women: Finding the Everyday at the Intersection of Image, Archive, and Oral History
• 11 Preserving the Latinx Sartorial Experience Through Digital Archives
• 12 Self-fashioning, Participatory Research, and the “Will to Adorn”
• Index
• Copyright