A timely and splendidly illustrated global exploration of the complex intersections of fashion and politics from the mid-19th century to the present day

Taking a multifaceted look at a topic of widespread fascination, this pioneering book presents new research on the intersection of fashion and politics through incisive essays by the field's leading voices, including both renowned and emerging fashion scholars. The texts unpack fashion between the mid-19th century and today as expressions of nationalism, terrorism, surveillance, and individualism, as well as a symbol of capitalism.

The first section explores the political potential of fashion despite its immutable status as a commodity. The second section offers a historical account of the political nature of dress, such as the fashion of dissent within Mao's Cultural Revolution and the Black Panther movement. The ways bodies are defined by dress-the entanglement of oppression and expression-is the theme of the third section. A fourth and final section explores contemporary issues in the practice and theory of dress, from the processes of decolonizing museum collections to the recent sartorial styles of Europe's political Left. The book's incisive and beautifully illustrated essays provide a timely investigation of an underdeveloped topic through a variety of historical and current formats, including public and personal archives, fashion magazines, political newspapers, museum displays, art, and social media.

For four decades the internationally renowned French artist ORLAN has interrogated every defining aspect of being human-gender, ethnicity, religion, beauty, physiognomy, and even physiology itself-through an endlessly mutating oeuvre that defies categorization. Performance, sculpture, photography, poetry, design-ORLAN not only creates within these media, she disappears into them, willfully dissolving and reconfiguring her identity through her work. ORLAN is most famous for her series of cosmetic-surgery performances in the 1990s in which she reconfigured her face and body as a critique of the standards of beauty imposed on women. In 2008, in a seemingly radical departure, ORLAN chose to disappear from her work entirely, effacing her famously protean features from her creations. In fact, she had chosen an even more dramatic way to dismantle her identity and perform it anew. With her Harlequin Coat project ORLAN borrows the commedia dell'arte trickster hero, the harlequin, as her alter ego, using his patchwork motif as a metaphor for the fragmented, multicolored, multilayered performance of the human signature. It is her most collaborative work to date, involving, at different stages, artists from the worlds of fashion, design, film, and technology. In reaching back to this Italian Renaissance character ORLAN simultaneously reaches forward into the most pressing of contemporary concerns: How can we be sure of who and what we are? Fabulous Harlequin showcases photographs of ORLAN's projects along with critical essays on ORLAN's work.