Craik J. The Face of Fashion: Cultural Studies in Fashion

London - New York: Routledge, 1994. — 250 p. — ISBN: 9780415052627, 0415052629, 9780415052610.This book breaks new ground in the study of fashion and the body by establishing the relations between codes and systems of clothing and the conduct of everyday life. The author questions the trickle-down theory that fashion is dictated by elite designers and opinion leaders with evidence of a trickle-up effect from subcultures, mass consumer behaviour and the everyday bricolage of fashion items. The book addresses the neglected area of men’s fashion as well as women’s fashion within a broad examination of the role of fashion in gender identity.The argument is developed through a number of key agencies and processes: consumerism and everyday fashion, the iconisation of the body through fashion models and photography, the use of cosmetics to ‘make-up’ the body, the nexus between fashion and gender and the changing fashions in underwear and swimwear as maps of the revealed body. The topics are approached from an interdisciplinary perspective that treats fashion systems as ethnographic traces of the cultural projection of the body.The face of fashion: technical bodies and technologies of self.
Exotic impulses in techniques of fashion.
Fashioning women: techniques of femininity.
Fashion models: female bodies and icons of femininity.
Soft focus: techniques of fashion photography.
States of undress: lingerie to swimwear.
Cosmetic attributes: techniques of make-up and perfume.
Fashioning masculinity: dressed for comfort or style.
Conclusion: nothing to wear.