Customer Reviews

Fashion, Culture, and Identity

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I just wanted to offer an alternative viewpoint to P.Campbell's review. What they say is correct, in that there is a lot of academic language in this book, but I think only to a degree that is appropriate to the level the book is aimed at.

The book refers to the 'dialectic' of fashion, there's a lot of 'mediating the body' etc, and true, Mr Davis does use the word 'apercu', which I will admit is nearly unforgiveable, when 'perception' would have done just as well.

However overall this book reads in tone pretty similar to an issue of 'Dress, Body, Culture'. It's a standard text for graduate research - you HAVE to read this if you are serious about fashion theory. It's really pretty accessible for a university level text; much more so than Barthe's fashion writing.

So, although it's not for everyone,I found this is a clear and insightful look at the way our culture and our dress influence each other.

The author wrote out this book, and then went back and replaced every word under 3 syllables with a larger, more obscure one. While I have been under the inpression that books of this nature were meant to convey information, he seem to think that informative books are for patting oneself on the back for being SO SMART. This book is self-indulgent and poorly written, and that's too bad, because it does cover a really interesting topic. Yes, it's dense, but it is possible to muddle through. But do you really want to?