Description:
Material Strategies brings together scholars from different disciplines to explore what dress and textiles can tell us about gender history.
- Broad in scope - covers women, men, social groupings and nations from the sixteenth to the twentieth century.
- Rich in detail - incorporates illustrations that provide visual evidence for gendered strategies of dress.
- Combines perspectives from design and textile history, business history, cultural anthropology, social history, art history and cultural history.
- Considers 'material strategies' in relation to production and consumption, the public and the private, the body and sexuality, and national identity.
- Written in a jargon-free style, making it accessible to readers from a wide range of backgrounds.
Review Quotes: "This stands out as a vaulable summation of the many approaches which, in shorthand, can be described as 'the new dress history'." Valerie Cummings
"This book is a significant, interdisciplinary consideration of the gendered characteristics of clothing that provides new conceptual frameworks and methodologies for the interpretation of attire across tiem and culture. Material Strategies should further move clothing and fashion scholarship out of its ghetto and into the mainstream. Textile History