Fashion imagery has existed for hundreds of years and yet the methods used by scholars to understand it have remained mostly historical and descriptive. The belief informing these approaches may be that fashion imagery is designed for one purpose: to depict a garment and how to wear it. In this interdisciplinary book, Sanda Miller suggests a radical alternative to these well-practiced approaches, proposing that fashion imagery has stories to tell and meanings to uncover. The methodology she has developed is an iconography of fashion imagery, based on the same theory which has been key to the History of Art for centuries.
Applying Panofsky's theory of iconography to illustrations from books, magazines and fashion plates, as well as fashion photography and even live fashion events, Miller uncovers three levels of meaning: descriptive, secondary (or conventional) and tertiary or 'symbolic'. In doing so, she answers questions such as who is the model; what did people wear and why; and how did people live? She proves that fashion imagery, far from being purely descriptive, is ripe with meaning and can be used to shed light on society, class, culture and the history of dress.
Author(s): Sanda Miller
Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
Year: 2021
Language: English
Pages: 296
City: London
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Figures
Foreword
Acknowledgements
Chapter 1: Introduction: A new tool for the fashion image: Iconography
Rationale
Iconography and its uses in the history of art
Structuralism and its uses in media and fashion studies
The link between iconography and semiotics
Iconography and the fashion images: Fritz Saxl’s ‘discovery’ of Il Libro del Sarto
Semiotics and the fashion image
Iconography and the fashion image
Case study: Giorgione’s La Tempesta and David LaChapelle’s Burning Down the House
Chapter 2: Renaissance books of clothes
How did it all begin? Villard de Honnecourt’s ‘Sketchbook’
Renaissance books of costume: A neglected subject of study
Fritz Saxl’s ‘discovery’ of Il Libro del Sarto
Hans Weigel’s Trachtenbuch, 1577
Christoph Weiditz’s ‘Book of Costumes’: Trachtenbuch 1560–80
Cesare Vecellio’s Degli habiti antichi e moderni
Matthäus Schwarz’s Klaidungsbüchlein or the Trachtenbuch (1520–60)
Chapter 3: The seventeenth century: A new profession – the gentleman journalist writing for Le Mercure galant
The Counter-Reformation and its consequences: Catholicism versus Protestantism
The reign of Louis XIV and the Court of Versailles
A new institution: the fashion magazine
Louis XIV’s legacy
Capturing elegance in the printed image at the French Court
Capturing the everyday in the printed image
Capturing elegance in England: A Bohemian printmaker, Wenceslaus Hollar
Capturing the everyday on the printed page during the Restoration
Chapter 4: The eighteenth century: From the fashion doll to the fashion plate
Reconfiguring the paradox of the Enlightenment and its revolutions
The ‘revolution’ in sartorial fashion
Visual representations of sartorial dress during the Directory period
In painting
On stage
In fashion magazines
The genesis of the Directory style
The ‘revolution’ of the fashion plate
Chapter 5: Capturing modernity in nineteenth-century France and England
Paris and La Parisienne
The invention of photography: Nadar and Disdéri
The ‘invention’ of haute couture
The relationship between painting, fashion illustration, literature and haute couture
Commercialism and the fashion magazine
Romanticism, historicism and the return to historic costume: Auguste Racinet’s Le Costume Historique
Rebellion and reform against the tyranny of fashion in England: Death to the crinoline!
Chapter 6: Modernism
Part One: Fashion and art; is fashion art?
Pioneering ‘modernism’ on the fashion plate: Paul Poiret
The relationship between fashion and the first avant-garde movements: Fauvism and cubism
Paul Iribe’s ‘Directory’ album and Georges Lepape’s ‘Orientalist’ album
A new way of presenting images on the page: Fashion photography
Fashion and art, case study: Madeleine Vionnet and Thayaht
The aftermath of the Second World War and the ideological division of Europe
Existentialism, feminism and fashion
Part Two: The photographed image on the page
Christian Dior and the ‘New Look’
Cristobal Balenciaga: A couturier of his time
The 1960s: ‘Street’ fashion in London and Paris
‘Anti-fashion’: Vivienne Westwood, queen of punk
The 1980s: ‘Thatcherism’, ‘Power’ dressing and the YUPPIES
The arrival of the Japanese in Europe
The 1990s
Part Three: The fashion show: Fashion as ‘spectacle’
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
