Fashion, Desire and Anxiety
Subtitle: Image and Morality in the 20th Century
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Published: March 2001
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 144
ISBN-13: 9780813529035
Subjects: Women's Studies - General; Social aspects; Fine Arts; Sociology; Art; Social History; Fashion; 20th century; History
Description: "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."--BOOK JACKET.