Culture of Fashion

English design and fashion historian Breward constructs an informative history of Western European fashion that draws equally on established scholarship (based primarily on formal developments) and more recent critical theories. Starting with the Middle Ages, each chapter is devoted to a different century and paradigm, from how fashion shaped the body during the 14th century to the impact of consumer culture in this one. The effect is akin to watching one of those time-lapse sequences of flowers blooming, as hemlines rise and fall, corsets squash and squeeze, flounces come and go and colors grow florid and fade while listening to a learned commentary on the social, political and cultural significance of this seemingly arbitrary activity. Indeed, there are many voices, as Breward quotes generously from period documents as well as from contemporary scholars. This is one of the book's strengths, along with its focus on men's fashions and the politics of gender--male homosexuality in particular. Some weaker aspects are the author's prose style, which can be inelegant, and the uneven picture research. When it comes to this century's fashions, the book's English bias also proves problematic. (The current street fashion is summed up by a picture of a bloke in a baseball cap and flight jacket.) Otherwise, this is a solid survey of dress and the issues currently surrounding it--there's much to know about a farthingale. (June)