Today, we are living in the New Space Age, where mass commercial space travel is almost within our grasp. This otherworldly possibility has opened up new cultural images of space, both real and fictional, and has caused fashion design and spacesuit engineering to intersect in new, exciting ways. Spacewear traverses this uncharted territory by exploring the changing imagination of space in fashion-and fashion in space-from the first Space Age to the 21st century. Exploring how space travel has stylistically and technologically framed fashion design on earth and how we need to revisit established design practices for the weightless environment, Spacewear connects the catwalk and the space station. This book draws together speculative fantasies in sci-fi films such as Star Trek and 2001: A Space Odyssey, with the engineered spacesuits Biosuit, and the NASA Z-2 and with catwalk interpretations by the likes of Alexander McQueen, Hussein Chalayan, Andre Courreges, and Iris van Herpen. While the development of commercial space agencies has led to new concerns for style in garments for outer space that re-think fundamental design principles such as drape, high fashion has experimented with new possibilities for weightlessness that extend far beyond the 1960s vision of Space Age metallic fabrics and helmet-style headwear. Brownie takes the reader on a fascinating journey from fantasy to function and to form, deepening our understanding of this new category of fashion that is prompting new approaches to garment design and construction both on earth and in outer space.

An exploration of how the rose-the most ravishingly beautiful and symbolic of flowers-has inspired fashion over hundreds of years The Rose in Fashion: Ravishing is a fascinating exploration of how the rose has inspired the way we look, dress, feel, and fantasize. It foregrounds innovative, refined, and challenging fashion design from elite 18th-century woven silks to the latest gender-neutral catwalk trends and Alexander McQueen rose dresses. Drawing upon fashion clothing, everyday dress, millinery, fine jewelry, perfume, and artificial and fresh roses, multiple expert contributors make reference to love, beauty, sex, sin, gendered identities, rites of passage, transgression, degradation, and death. This sumptuously illustrated book also includes a contribution and stunning images of roses by visionary photographer Nick Knight. Wild yet cultivated, savage yet delicate, this flower has remained an enduring symbol perhaps due to its versatility and the dichotomies it represents.

Taking a major textile artwork, The Knitting Map, as a central case study, this book interrogates the social, philosophical and critical issues surrounding contemporary textile art today. It explores gestures of community and controversy manifest in contemporary textile art practices, as both process and object. Created by more than 2,000 knitters from 22 different countries, who were mostly working-class women, The Knitting Map became the subject of national controversy in Ireland. Exploring the creation of this multi-modal artwork as a key moment in Irish art history, Textiles, Community and Controversy locates the work within a context of feminist arts practice, including the work of Judy Chicago, Faith Ringold and the Guerilla Girls. Bringing together leading art critics and textile scholars, including Lucy Lippard, Jessica Hemmings and Joanne Turney, the collection explores key issues in textile practice from gender, class and nation to technology and performance.

Lace was a passion of Leopold Ikle (1838-1922), scion of a Hamburg textile dynasty who successfully produced machine-made embroidery over the course of the industrial boom in St. Gallen around 1900. He exported to England, France and the United States, among other places, at a time when St. Gallen was the market leader in the lace industry. Ikle's collection of handmade European bobbin lace and needlepoint from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century originally served as inspiration for his firm's textile designers. Through his passion for collecting, however, it quickly surpassed the practical demands of a simple pattern collection, and in 1904 he donated it to the Textile Museum St. Gallen. Historische Spitzen provides a comprehensive review as well as highlights of the lace samples in this unique collection. Text in German.

The fashion business has been collecting and analyzing information about colors, fabrics, silhouettes, and styles since the 18th century - activities that have long been shrouded in mystery. The Fashion Forecasters is the first book to reveal the hidden history of color and trend forecasting and to explore its relevance to the fashion business of the past two centuries. It sheds light on trend forecasting in the industrial era, the profession's maturation during the modernist moment of the 20th century, and its continued importance in today's digital fast-fashion culture. Based on in-depth archival research and oral history interviews, The Fashion Forecasters examines the entrepreneurs, service companies, and consultants that have worked behind the scenes to connect designers and retailers to emerging fashion trends in Europe, North America, and Asia. Here you will read about the trend studios, color experts, and international trade fairs that formalized the prediction process in the modern era, and hear the voices of leading contemporary practitioners at international forecasting companies such as the Doneger Group in New York and WGSN in London. Probing the inner workings of the global fashion system, The Fashion Forecasters blends history, biography, and ethnography into a highly readable cultural narrative.

Collections of textiles-historic costume, quilts, needlework samplers, and the like-have benefited greatly from the digital turn in museum and archival work. Both institutional online repositories and collections-based social media sites have fostered unprecedented access to textile collections that have traditionally been marginalized in museums. How can curators, interpreters, and collections managers make best use of these new opportunities? To answer this question, the author worked with sites including the Great Lakes Quilt Center at the Michigan State University Museum, the Design Center at Philadelphia University, the International Quilt Study Center and Museum at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and the WGBH Boston Media Library and Archives, as well as user-curated social sites online such as Tumblr and Polyvore, to create four compelling case studies on the preservation, access, curation, and interpretation of textile objects. The book explores: *The nature of digital material culture. *The role of audience participation versus curatorial authority online. *Audience-friendly collections metadata and tagging. *Visual, rather than text-based, searching and cataloging. *The legality of ownership and access of museum collections online. *Gender equity in museums and archives. This book is essential reading for anyone who cares for, collects, exhibits, or interprets historic costume or textile collections, but its broad implications for the future of museum work make it relevant for anyone with an interest in museum work online. And because the focus of this volume is theory and praxis, rather than specific technologies that are likely to become obsolete, it will be staple on your bookshelf for years to come.