20th Century Fashion [antikvár]

Tlie eplienieral nature of fashion distinguishes it from other modes of dress such as ceremonial, occupational and ethnographic. In the twentieth century the fasiiion system came to revolve around the exacting biannual schedule of Autumn/Winter, Spring/Summer collections and was then extended to include mid-season collections and speciality lines. The period witnessed a major shift in the output of top designers, from haute couture, which was, and still is, hand-crafted and custom-made for each client, to the design of cheaper, limited-edition diffusion lines and rapidly manufactured ready-to-wear fashions.Fashion's inherent obsolescence, whereby clothes are discarded on the basis of the desire for stylistic novelty rather than for utilitarian reasons, generates passionate response from consumers and theoreticians alike. Fashion has been held up to ridicule, condemned as an insidious form of capitalist manipulation and dismissed as a merely frivolous aesthetic phenomenon - since it is forever changing, it can be of no lasting value. In The Theory of the Leisure Class, Thorstein Veblen famously highlighted the conspicuous consumption' component of fashion as early as 1899 and his description, applied to a lavish ensemble of 1900, holds good a century later for a 'look at me' garment emblazoned with a designer logo.Fashion has attracted the attention and endorsement of an expanding range of academics, increasingly fascinated by its multi- and inter-disciplinary significance. Thus the work of psychologists, anthropologists, economists, philosophers, sociologists, theatre and film designers, as well as dress historians, has bestowed an academic validity on fashion. Allied to the burgeoning involvement of cultural historians and semiologists, this has led to the recent proliferation of courses in fashion studies at every educational level, from primary school to university. Lacking the comprehensive documentation of other arts, the diverse literature of fashion is now expanding rapidly and can be divided into broad theoretical, historical and object-based strands. A growing preoccupation with personal appearance since the end of the Second