'This study of mass-consumption shows how a focus on single fibre can yield so much about the fabric of social change.This book shows how clothing often lies at the intersection between individual, bodily experience and the larger forces at work in the world. The book reveals as much about academic fashion as it does about the materiality of clothing.'Crafts Magazine : Decorative Applied Arts, No.197 November/December 2005 review by Pamela Johnson
Summary
This book puts the material back into clothing. In recent years social scientists have become increasingly interested in theories of fashion, but have rarely directly addressed the material qualities of clothing. By contrast, traditional studies of dress have focused on textiles but often neglect the larger cultural context within which dress becomes consumed as clothing. This book fills a major gap by combining these two 'camps' through an expressly material culture approach to clothing. In sustained case studies, Kchler and Miller argue that cloth and clothing are living, vibrant parts of culture and the body. From the recycling of cloth in Africa and India and the use of pattern in the Pacific, to the history of 'wash and wear' and why women wear the wrong clothes to restaurants in London, this book shows the considerable advantage gained by seamlessly combining material and social aspects of dress and textiles.
Table of Contents
Introduction--Daniel Miller
* Why are there Quilts in Polynesia?--Susanne Kuuml;chler
* Nga Aho Tipuna (Ancestral Threads): Maori Cloaks from New Zealand--Amiria Henare
* Relative Imagery: Patterns of Response to the Revival of Archaic Chiefly Dress in Fiji--Chloe Colchester
* Pattern, Efficacy And Enterprise: On the Fabrication of Connections In Melanesia--Graeme Were
* Looking Good, Feeling Right: Aesthetics of the Self--Sophie Woodward
* The Other Half: the Material Culture of New Fibres--Kaori O'Connor
* Aesthetics, Ethics and the Politics of the Turkish Headscarf--Ouml;zlem Sandikci and Guuml;liz Ger
* Cloth that Lies: the Secrets of Recycling in India--Lucy Norris
* From Thrift to Fashion: Materiality and Aesthetics in Dress Practices in Zambia--Karen Tranberg Hansen
