Fashion, Desire and Anxiety: Image and Morality in the Twentieth Century [Paperback]

Rebecca Arnold (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 1, 2001

An analysis of fashion, focusing on the historical and ethical potential that modern style embodies.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"... presents a fast-paced yet comprehensive study that provides surprise connections between fashion and the wide culture on every page." -- -Shari Benstock, coeditor of Footnotes: On Shoes

"Arnold presents a fast-paced yet comprehensive study that provides surprise connections between fashion and the wide culture on every page." -- Shari Benstock, coeditor of Footnotes: On Shoes

From the Back Cover

Fashion, and the glossy magazines it inhabits, allow Western culture to dream. It permits a person to fantasize and to experiment with new identities. It flaunts glamour and success. Appearance becomes something to be perfected and admired. These dreams and freedoms, Rebecca Arnold proposes, are contradictory. Fashion and its surrounding imagery elicit fear and anxiety in their consumers as well as pleasure. Fashion has come to incorporate the underside of modern life, with violence and decay becoming a dominant theme in clothing design and photography. Arnold draws on diverse written sources to explore the complex nature of modern fashion. She discusses a range of key themes: how fashion uses and abuses the power of wealth; the alienating promotion of "good" taste; the power plays of sex and display; and how identities can be blurred to disguise and confuse. In order to unravel the contradictory emotions of desire and anxiety they provoke, she never loses sight of the historical and cultural contexts in which fashion designers and photographers perform.

Generously illustrated, Fashion, Desire and Anxiety focuses on the last thirty years, from photographic works of the 1970s to the beginning of the twenty-first century.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 144 pages
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press (March 1, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0813529042
• ISBN-13: 978-0813529042
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7.4 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #503,141 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Spectacular!, January 13, 2003

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tamiii "tamiii" (San Juan Capistrano, Ca. United States) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Fashion, Desire and Anxiety: Image and Morality in the Twentieth Century (Paperback)

With quick-paced, beautiful prose, Arnold distills, illuminates, and reveals the violence and decay which has become the dominant theme of end of the Century high-fashion. Generously illustrated and neatly referenced, she examines how power is wielded through fashion; how fashion blurs and disguises; and, most importantly, how it gives expression to the desires and anxieties of a buying public overwhelmed by a kind of creeping brutality. Never losing sight of historical and cultural contexts, she nevertheless delights in making her point by the exquisite examination of a detail. In a word, remarkable!