Books like The classic ten by Nancy MacDonell Smith

When Bailey dreams of crystal‑rainbow dresses, adults dismiss him as a boy. With the support of new friend Laurel, imagining and crafting gowns turns dreams into reality, exploring gender identity and friendship for young readers.

290 p. : 25 cm

A visual exploration of global 1980s fashion, tracing the decade’s iconic styles and cultural shifts.

Gilles Lipovetsky explores how fashion—from elite privilege to mass culture—has shaped social identity, democratic values, and personal expression over two millennia.

Explores how gender identity, hormone therapy, and gender‑reassignment surgery intersect with clothing choices, social roles, and psychological experience among transsexuals.

A concise survey of 1920s fashion, exploring the fads, trends, and cultural currents that defined the decade’s stylish lifestyle.

A pictorial survey of international 1960s fashion, exploring how style mirrored the era’s social customs and youth culture across the globe.

What Herbert Blau suggests, in Nothing in Itself, is that fashion itself, today, has been anticipating and redefining, in the dazzle on the runway, or even in ready-to-wear, the terms in which it is critiqued, while sometimes giving the impression that it is inseparable from critique; in short, there is little to be said of fashion that is not somehow visible in fashion, though even in the mainstream we may call it antifashion. Which is all the more reason to look at the clothes. The book does so copiously, with a fastidious eye to style, as if nothing could be said of a garment, no appropriate fabric of thought, without the felt sensation. Meanwhile, if the theatricality of fashion, or the "fashion system," is now belabored in cultural studies, there are other seductive issues--recurring in history and, like the rise and fall of the hemline, approaching the metaphysical--that come with dress in its fascination-effect. As Blau sees it, this will inevitably return us to the validities, artful vanities, and deceits of appearance. No more than appearance, "nothing in itself," that fashion has substance, complex and elusive substance, is the thematic of this book, which puts another complexion on the subject, the look, and the look that incites the look, in high style, street style, classical elegance or fetishistic chic, from farthingale and corset to drop-dead glamour, power suits, waifishness, and grunge.

"Using a wide range of historical and contemporary materials, Diana Crane demonstrates how the social significance of clothing has been transformed.". "Crane compares nineteenth-century societies - France, England, and the United States - where social class was the most salient aspect of social identity signified in clothing with late twentieth-century America, where lifestyle, gender, sexual orientation, age, and ethnicity are more meaningful to individuals in constructing their wardrobes."--BOOK JACKET.