Books like Fashion and Cultural Studies by Susan B. Kaiser

Explores how clothing signals identity, culture, and social status, charting the rise and fall of fashion trends and the industry’s response to changing cultural forces.

Explains how clothes reveal our identity and social status through a comparative study of the language of clothing in history, social context, logic, and psychology.

This book represents a significant contribution to the growing body of literature on the cultural meanings of dress, as well as to material culture, anthropology, folklore, art history, ethnohistory, and linguistics.

A richly illustrated exploration of the sari as a living symbol of Indian culture, presented through the voices of villagers, scientists, and women of today.

Fashion Cultures Revisited offers 26 fresh chapters that trace how fashion culture has evolved from 2000 to today, examining shopping, media, production, icons, and gender dynamics within global contexts.

Showcasing Japan's astonishingly varied culture of cute, this volume takes the reader on a dazzling and adorable visual journey through all things kawaii. Although some trace the phenomenon of kawaii as far back as Japan's Taisho era, it emerged most visibly in the 1970s when schoolgirls began writing in big, bubbly letters complete with tiny hearts and stars. From cute handwriting came manga, Hello Kitty, and Harajuku, and the kawaii aesthetic now affects every aspect of Japanese life. As colorful as its subject matter, this book contains numerous interviews with illustrators, artists, fashion designers, and scholars. It traces the roots of the movement from sociological and anthropological perspectives and looks at kawaii's darker side as it morphs into gothic and gloomy iterations. Best of all, it includes hundreds of colorful photographs that capture kawaii's ubiquity: on the streets and inside homes, on lunchboxes and airplanes, in haute couture and street fashion, in café́s, museums, and hotels.

Explores how fashion signals class, gender, sexuality and social identity through interdisciplinary theory.

"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.

An engaging guide to the enduring fashion staples of women's clothing history, featuring ten iconic pieces and their significance.