In recent years, the study of textiles and culture has become a dynamic field of scholarship, reflecting new global, material and technological possibilities. This is the first handbook of specially commissioned essays to provide a guide to the major strands of critical work around textiles past and present and to draw upon the work of artists and designers as well as researchers in textiles studies. The handbook offers an authoritative and wide-ranging guide to the topics, issues, and questions that are central to the study of textiles today: it examines how material practices reflect cross-cultural influences; it explores textiles' relationships to history, memory, place, and social and technological change; and considers their influence on fashion and design, sustainable production, craft, architecture, curation and contemporary textile art practice. This illustrated volume will be essential reading for students and scholars involved in research on textiles and related subjects such as dress, costume and fashion, feminism and gender, art and design, and cultural history. Cover image: Anne Wilson, To Cross (Walking New York), 2014. Site-specific performance and sculpture at The Drawing Center, NYC. Thread cross research. Photo: Christie Carlson/Anne Wilson Studio.

Design Studies: A Reader is the ideal entry point for any student who wants to understand the many complex roles of design - as process, product, function, symbol, and use. Reflecting the diverse range of perspectives on design, the reader brings together over seventy key texts. The essays are presented in themed sections covering history, methods, theory, visuality, identity, consumption, labor, industrialization, new technology, sustainability, and globalization. Each section is separately introduced and each concludes with a guide to further reading. In addition, a final section of specially commissioned essays analyzes ten seminal designs of the twentieth century, from Helvetica to the cell phone. Bringing together the best classic and contemporary writing, Design Studies: A Reader will be invaluable to all students of Design as well as to students of Architecture, Art, Material Culture, and Sociology. Authors include: Theodor Adorno, Arjun Appadurai, Reyner Banham, Jean Baudrillard, Zygmunt Bauman, Pierre Bourdieu, Cheryl Buckley, Michel de Certeau, Margaret Crawford, Arthur C Danto, Adrian Forty, Michel Foucault, Buckminster Fuller, Paul du Gay, Erving Goffman, Donna Haraway, Dick Hebdige, John Chris Jones, Guy Julier, Naomi Klein, Ezio Manzini, Victor Margolin, Karl Marx, Daniel Miller, Victor Papanek, Nikolaus Pevsner, John Styles, and John Walker.

Fashion is both public and private, material and symbolic, always caught within the lived experience and providing an incredible tool to study culture and history.

The Fabric of Cultures examines the impact of fashion as a manufacturing industry and as a culture industry that shapes the identities of nations and cities in a cross-cultural perspective, within a global framework. The collected essays investigate local and global economies, cultures and identities and the book offers for the first time, a wide spectrum of case studies which focus on a diversity of geographical spaces and places, from global capitals of fashion such as New York, to countries less known or identifiable for fashion such as contemporary Greece and soviet Russia.

Highly illustrated and including essays from all over the world, The Fabric of Cultures provides a comprehensive survey of the latest interdisciplinary scholarship on fashion, identity and globalisation.

Fashion is both public and private, material and symbolic, always caught within the lived experience and providing an incredible tool to study culture and history.

The Fabric of Cultures examines the impact of fashion as a manufacturing industry and as a culture industry that shapes the identities of nations and cities in a cross-cultural perspective, within a global framework. The collected essays investigate local and global economies, cultures and identities and the book offers for the first time, a wide spectrum of case studies which focus on a diversity of geographical spaces and places, from global capitals of fashion such as New York, to countries less known or identifiable for fashion such as contemporary Greece and soviet Russia.

Highly illustrated and including essays from all over the world, The Fabric of Cultures provides a comprehensive survey of the latest interdisciplinary scholarship on fashion, identity and globalisation.

The rules for the Nightmare Scenario: 1. The player must complete the scenario to gain points and reach the next level. 2. The voices can help during the scenario. 3. The scenario will access the player's fears. 4. The characters in the scenario can physically harm the player. 5. Once started, the scenario must be completed. Do you accept the scenario? Yes, or no? Eighteen-year-old Gracie Thrace has a secret. Four months ago she started to hear voices that force her to carry out frightening scenarios. With her father abroad and her relationship with her high-powered mother strained, Gracie has no one to turn to for solace. When a new voice called Kai materialises, Gracie finds herself attached to his kindness. Kai offers the support Gracie craves, but how can she possibly let herself fall for someone who isn't real? Set in 2047 London, Nightmare Scenario is a complex and touching love story that explores the stigma around mental illness and offers a daunting prediction of the future where technology infiltrates every part of society.

Taking cultural theorist Michel de Certeau's notion of 'the everyday' as a critical starting point, this book considers how fashion shapes and is shaped by everyday life. Looking historically for the imprint of fashion within everyday routines such as going to work or shopping, or in leisure activities like dancing, the book identifies the 'fashion system of the ordinary', in which clothing has a distinct role in the making of self and identity. Exploring the period from 1890 to 2010, the study is located in London and New York, cities that emerged as as socially, ethnically and culturally diverse, as well as increasingly fashionable. The book re-focuses fashion discourse away from well-trodden, power-laden dynamics, towards a re-evaluation of time, memory, and above all history, and their relationship to fashion and everyday life. The importance of place and space - and issues of gender, race and social class - provides the broader framework, revealing fashion as both routine and exceptional, and as an increasingly significant part of urban life. By focusing on key themes such as clothing the city, what is worn on the streets, the imagining and performing of multiple identities by dressing up and down, going out, and showing off, Fashion and Everyday Life makes a unique contribution to the literature of fashion studies, fashion history, cultural studies, and beyond.

The history, global trade and current western revival of interest in used garments as a new form of fashion consciousness has corollaries in consumer cultures around the world. The Japanese, for example, have a long tradition of salvaging sections of kimonos, while in India garments are inexhaustibly recycled. Despite the seeming universality of the impulse, however, there is a wide spectrum of views towards reused clothing. Global issues of need and economy are central to the second-hand trade, as is personal taste. Complicating these issues, used garments can now be fashionable, desirable commodities in western urban cultures; they may represent exclusivity in design as well as a means to re-shape identity, as the neo-mod retro-sixties subcultural scene shows. The boom in charity shops, in second-hand retailers from large chains, and in second-hand and vintage boutiques aims to capture this growing market. second-hand, but has become its own style and is now integrated into the mainstream fashion system as the interest in vintage has escalated. Second-hand fashion has a history as old as the production of clothing itself, but it has not been discussed before in a focused way as an important, on-going part of fashion history, despite the fact that used clothes represent the largest numbers of worn and existing garments. This cross-cultural and historical perspective fills a major gap by offering fresh insights into the innovative use of second-hand dress and age-old traditions of recycling fashion. It will be essential reading for all those interested in fashion, consumption, material culture and design.

Recent interest in 'vintage' and second hand clothes by both fashion consumers and designers is only the latest manifestation of a long and complex cultural history of wearing and trading second hand clothes. With its origins in necessity, the passing of clothes between social and economic groups is now a global business, but with roots that are centuries old. To move from one social and cultural situation to another used clothes must be 'transformed' to become of potential value to a new social group. How, when and why this has happened is the subject of this book. Old Clothes, New Looks presents a three-part focus on the history, the trading culture, and the contemporary refashioning of second hand clothing. Historical perspectives include studies located in Renaissance Florence, early industrial England, colonial Australia, and mid twentieth-century Ireland. The global nature of the second hand trade in clothing is presented through original research from Zambia, India, the Philippines, Hong Kong, and Japan. The reuse of garments as contemporary fashion statements is explored through studies that include neo-mod retro-sixties subculture in Germany, the impact of 'vintage' in the USA on consumers and designers, as well as consideration of its sartorial and cultural challenges, encapsulated by the work of designer XULY.Bet. This groundbreaking book will be essential reading for all those interested in fashion and dress, material culture, consumption and anthropology, as well as to dealers, collectors and wearers of second hand clothes.