Producing Fashion

by Blaszczyk, Regina Lee

• ISBN13: 9780812220667
• ISBN10: 0812220668
• Edition: Revised
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2009-04-06
• Publisher: Univ of Pennsylvania Pr

Summary

How has Paris, the world's fashion capital, influenced Milan, New York, and Tokyo? When did the Marlboro Man become a symbol of American masculinity? Why do Americans love to dress down in high-tech Lycra fabrics, while they wax nostalgic for quaint, old-fashioned Victorian cottages? Fashion icons and failures have long captivated the general public, but few scholars have examined the historical role of business and commerce in creating the international market for style goods.Producing Fashionis a groundbreaking collection of original essays that shows how economic institutions in Europe and North America laid the foundation for the global fashion system and sustained it commercially through the mechanisms of advertising, licensing, marketing, publishing, and retailing. The collection reveals how public and private institutions--from government censors in imperial Russia to large corporations in the United States--worked to shape fashion, style, and taste with varying degrees of success. Fourteen contributors draw on original research and fresh insight into the producers of fashion--advertising agents, architects, corporate executives, department stores, designers, editors, government officials, hairdressers, haute couturiers, and Web retailers--in their bid for influence, acclaim, and shoppers' dollars.Producing Fashionlooks to the past, revealing the rationale behind style choices, while explaining how the interplay of custom, invented traditions, and sales imperatives continue to drive innovation in the fashion industries.

Author Biography

Regina Lee Blaszczyk is a visiting scholar in the Department of the History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania. Her books include the award-winning Imagining Consumers: Design and Innovation from Wedgwood to Corning and Major Problems in American Business History: Documents and Essays.

Table of Contents

Rethinking Fashion	p. 1
Organizing the Fashion Trades
Spreading the Word: The Development of the Russian Fashion Press	p. 21
Accessorizing, Italian Style: Creating a Market for Milan's Fashion Merchandise	p. 42
In the Shadow of Paris? French Haute Couture and Belgian Fashion Between the Wars	p. 62
Licensing Practices at Maison Christian Dior	p. 82
Inventing Fashions, Promoting Styles
The Wiener Werkstäet;tte and the Reform Impulse	p. 111
American Fashions for American Women: The Rise and Fall of Fashion Nationalism	p. 130
Coiffing Vanity: Advertising Celluloid Toilet Sets in 1920s America	p. 150
Shaping Bodies, Building Brands
California Casual: Lifestyle Marketing and Men's Leisurewear, 1930-1960	p. 169
Marlboro Men: Outsider Masculinities and Commercial Modeling in Postwar America	p. 187
The Body and the Brand: How Lycra Shaped America	p. 207
Customer Reactions, Consumer Adaptations
French Hairstyles and the Elusive Consumer	p. 231
Ripping Up the Uniform Approach: Hungarian Women Piece Together a New Communist Fashion	p. 250
Why the Old-Fashioned Is in Fashion in American Houses	p. 273
Notes	p. 293
List of Contributors	p. 349
Index	p. 353
Acknowledgments	p. 365
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