Women & Fashion

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There are many new looks in fashion; here, at last, is a new look at fashion which focuses on the perplexing relationship between women, fashion and femininity: It brings together fashion and semiotics, psychoanalysis and style, interweaving the vocabulary of fashion literature with that of cultural studies and feminist theory. Helmut Newton's flashing model is contrasted with Deborah Tuberville's models of passive resistence, Jean Paul Gaultier's Dervish Bra with Elsa Schiaparelli's Shoe Hat, the cultural terrorism of punk in the 1970s with the postmodern bedlam of fashion in the 1980s. Analysing fashion at a level of representation, concerned more with images and ideas than with cut and fit, the authors make a series of sorties into fashion photography, design and cultural history, with centre around women, their bodies, and the pleasures and pains of fashion. An examination of attitudes to fashion in the early Women's Liberation Movement is followed by an analysis of how femininity has been appropriated and re-appropriated by women in the urban styles and subcultures of the 1970s and 1980s.