Not Just Any Dress
Subtitle: Narratives of Memory, Body, and Identity (Counterpoints (New York, N.Y.), V. 220.)
Contributors: Sandra Weber (Editor); Claudia Mitchell (Editor)
Publisher: Peter Lang Publishing
Published: June 2004
Language: eng
Format: Paperback
Number of pages: 298
ISBN-13: 9780820461182
Subjects: Beauty & Grooming - General; Sociology - General; Social Science; Fashion & Grooming; Body, Human; Clothing and dress; Psychological aspects; Symbolic aspects; Women's clothing; Sociology
Description: "This collection of short stories, essays, and poems features dress as the structural grounding for autobiographical accounts of women's lives in Western society. Often personal in nature, these "dress stories: point unfailingly to matters of social and cultural import. Some of the dresses described inhabit the popular imagination: the little girl dress, the communion dress, the school uniform, the prom dress, the wedding dress, the little black dress, and the burial dress. Beyond the semiotic, tactile, and visual aspects of the dresses themselves, the narratives delve into what dresses reveal about fundamental aspects of human experience: identity, embodiment, relationship, and mortality. Bought or made, then worn, forgotten, remembered, re-constructed, and re-interpreted, each dress offers a new glimpse into how we construct meaning in our daily lives, and how dresses serve to reinforce or resist social structures and cultural expectations."--BOOK JACKET.