Inspired by a rapidly changing fashion landscape, Fashion: New Feminist Essays offers historical and contemporary studies that reveal the relationships between fashion with gender, sexuality, race, and age. Fashion is a rich terrain for feminist scholars in the twenty-first century. Explicit engagements with feminist and queer politics, critical interventions by industry outsiders across digital platforms, diversifying images of stylish bodies, and ongoing discussions of the ethics and sustainability of fashion production: all of these point to an urgent need to reappraise the relationship of fashion to feminism and other justice-seeking movements. The essays in this collection take up fashion as a feminist critical tool that uniquely holds together the lived and represented body with larger cultural structures. Contributors unearth surprising new lines of connection between gender, sexuality, race, age, and religion in their relationship to capitalism, both historically and in the present. Bringing together established and emerging scholars, and perspectives from gender studies, history, sociology, philosophy, and literary studies, Fashion: New Feminist Essays traces the far-reaching impact of this most feminized of forms, underscoring the significance of fashion studies for understanding the politics of culture. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Australian Feminist Studies journal.

Fashion and Feeling: The Affective Politics of Dress explores the complex nexus of fashion and the feeling body from a variety of critical perspectives across fashion studies, anthropology, sociology, design practice, and media studies. It asks such questions as: What does fashion look and feel like in an age dominated by amplified anxiety, isolation, depression, and precariousness? How are feelings woven into clothing and mobilized through fashion practices in ways that might sustain living with a sense of ongoing crisis? Does fashion have the potential to help us reimagine new lifeworlds which might be reinvigorating? In other words, how is fashion engaging with the "bad," the "good," and the ambivalent feelings associated with our personal and collective histories, with our troubled political present, and with our imagined future? Despite such diverse and scattered contributions, the potentialities of "feeling" for the study of fashion are still largely neglected. This edited volume seeks to tease out possible avenues of investigation of the clothed body and its representations through the lens of feeling.

Through a highly original and detailed analysis of the memoirs, interviews and other life writings of Poiret, Dior and Schiaparelli, this book explores changing notions of femininity in the early decades of the 20th century, when the democratization of fashion began.
Examining idea of modernity, eternity and the ephemeral in the writings of these haute couturiers, the book reflects on fashion's ambivalent approach to women, which both celebrated and vilified them, presenting them as both ultra modern style leaders and irrational creatures stuck in the past.
This fascinating text is key reading for scholars and students of fashion, gender studies, cultural studies and history.