Fashion and the glossy magazines it inhabits allows Western culture to dream. Fashion permits a person to fantasize and to experiment with new identities. It flaunts glamour and success; appearance becomes something to be perfected and admired. These dreams and freedoms, Rebecca Arnold proposes, are contradictory. Fashion and its surrounding imagery elicit fear and anxiety in their consumers as well as pleasure. Fashion has come to incorporate the underside of modern life with violence and decay becoming a dominating theme in clothing design and photography.
Rebecca Arnold draws on diverse written sources to explore the complex nature of modern fashion. She discusses a range of key themes: how fashion uses and abuses the power of wealth; the alienating promotion of 'good' taste; the rising tide of aggression in fashion imagery and street styles; the power-plays of sex and display; and how identities can be blurred to disguise and confuse. Generously illustrated, Fashion, Desire and Anxiety focuses on the last thirty years, from photographic works of the 1970s such as those by Guy Bourdin and Helmut Newton, who set models against backdrops of tarnished glamour, to the decade of threatening femmes fatales conceived by designers Alexander McQueen and John Galliano. It sets the designers and photographers discussed into their historical and cultural contexts to unravel the contradictory emotions of desire and anxiety which they provoke.
This text argues that fashion and the imagery surrounding it give us a vision of Western culture that is both enticing and alienating. Rebecca Arnold exlores the complex nature of modern fashion, attempting to unravel the contradictory emotions of desire and anxiety that it provokes.
