Fashion Aesthetics and Ethics: Past and Present - Softcover

Louise Wallenberg; Andrea Kollnitz

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1350198528 ISBN 13: 9781350198524

Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2022

Synopsis

How are aesthetics and ethics related to the practical realities of the global fashion industry? Both have played an important role in academic fashion studies to this point, but they are most often discussed in the context of abstract phenomena such as modernity and capitalism, or identity issues such as sexuality, class and gender. The essays in this volume strive instead to show how the realities of the global fashion industry have important and pertinent aesthetic and ethical consequences.

This collection provides critical and philosophical analysis of the interplay of aesthetics and ethics within the global fashion industry. Characterized by an increasingly fast spinning production, the industry is highly exploitative in terms of environment and labor force: underpaid textile workers, retailers working under brutal competition from the mass-merchandise discounters, young designers, seamstresses and curators often working for free, and a vast body of aspiring models. In addition, fashion-related aesthetic ideals are becoming more influential than ever in directing consumers in their social and personal identification processes and bodily practices with sometimes fatal consequences.

These wide-ranging essays, covering subjects such as fashion’s highly problematic production and consumption practices, the possibility of producing and consuming fashion ethically, fashion’s intimate connection with nature and technology, seek to highlight the powerful aesthetical presence of fashion in relation to its ethical premises and often problematic outcomes.

About this title

About the Authors

Louise Wallenberg is Professor in Fashion Studies at Stockholm University, Sweden. She holds a PhD in Film Studies, and she was the establishing director of the Centre for Fashion Studies between 2007 and 2013. Among her publications are the collections MODE (2009); Nordic Fashion Studies (2011); Mode och modernism (2014); Fashion, Film, and the 1960s (2017); Fashion and Modernism (2018); What about all these women? (2022); and Ingmar Bergman at the Crossroads (2022).

Andrea Kollnitz is professor of Art History and head of the Art History Department, Stockholm University, Sweden. Her current research is focused on the self-fashioning of the avant-garde artist; nationalist visual and textual fashion and art discourse, fashion photography and caricature. She is co-editor, with Marco Pecorari, of Fashion, Performance and Performativity (2021), and, with Louise Wallenberg, of Fashion and Modernism (2018).

Edition details

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
• Publication date: 2022
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1350198528
• ISBN 13: 9781350198524
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288
• Editor: Louise Wallenberg, Andrea Kollnitz