Dressed to Impress: Looking the Part - Couverture rigide

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 1859734553 ISBN 13 : 9781859734551

Editeur : Berg Publishers, 2001

Synopsis

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A propos du livre

Présentation de l'éditeur :

Our dress is our identity. In dress, we live, move and have our social being. This book shows how the dressed body is central to the construction of a recognizable identity and provides accessible accounts of the particular dress ways' associated with a considerable variety of lifestyles. Churchgoers, ballerinas, Muslim schoolgirls, glamour models, vampires', monks and country gents all fashion a social self through dress. These cultures all have characteristic forms of displaying the dressed body for social visibility - whether in religion, sex, performance, or on the street. In contrast to much of the literature on dress, which often assumes a lack of agency on the part of the wearer, contributors to this book focus on the conscious manipulation of dress to reflect an identity that is designed to look different'. Why do people choose to mark themselves off socially from others? What are the costs and benefits? For every dress identity', there is a corresponding set of entitlements and expectations as to behaviour and belief. Priestly' bodies inhabit a different universe of response from strippers, just as Gothic' bodies experience the public gaze differently from Methodist' ones. Where one look commands respect in one setting, in another it can incite antipathy and rejection. Contributors tackle head-on this paradox of dress' - its potent power to unite and divide. Evidence of the dressed body's social ambiguity as a medium of consensus, on the one hand, and conflict, on the other, provides a glimpse through dress into an elementary condition of social and cultural life that has all too rarely been part of historical and sociological discourse.

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: Berg Publishers
• Date d'édition: 2001
• ISBN 10: 1859734553
• ISBN 13: 9781859734551
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 256