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Aside from the occasional nod to epaulettes or use of camouflage, war and fashion seem to be strange partners. Not so, argue the contributors to this book, who connect military industrial practices as well as military dress to textile and clothing in new ways. For instance, the book includes a series of commentaries on the impact of military dress in the airline industry, in illustrated wartime comics and even considers today’s muscled soldier’s body as a new type of uniform. Elsewhere, the effects of conquest introduce a new set of postcolonial aesthetics as military and colonial regimes disrupt local textile production and garment making. In another chapter, it is argued that textiles and fashion are important because they reflect a core practice, one that bridges textile artists and designers in an expressive, creative and deeply physical way to matters of cultural significance. And the book concludes by calling the very mode of 'military chic' into ethical question.

The premier text to illustrate the impact of war on textiles, bodies, costume, art and design, Fashion & War in Popular Culture will be warmly welcomed by scholars of fashion design and theory, historians of fashion and those interested in theories of warfare and military science.

Introduction

Contextualizing fashion and war within popular culture – Jennifer Craik

Overview – Denise N. Rall

Section I: The military in popular culture

Chapter 1: Representation of female wartime bravery in Australia’s Wanda the War Girl and Jane at War from the UK – Jane Chapman

Chapter 2: Fashionable fascism: Cinematic images of the Nazi before and after 9/11 – Kylee M. Hartman-Warren

Chapter 3: Branding the muscled male body as military costume – Heather Smith and Richard Gehrmann

Section II: Fashion and the military

Chapter 4: In the service of clothes: Elsa Schiaparelli and the war experience – Annita Boyd

Chapter 5: The discipline of appearance: Military style and Australian flight hostess uniforms 1930–1964 – Prudence Black

Chapter 6: Models, medals, and the use of military emblems in fashion – Amanda Laugesen

Section III: Framing youth fashion, textile artworks and postcolonial costume in the context of conflict

Chapter 7: Battle dressed – clothing the criminal, or the horror of the ‘hoodie’ in Britain – Joanne Turney

Chapter 8: Dutch wax and display: London and the art of Yinka Shonibare – Davinia Gregory

Chapter 9: Costume and conquest: Introducing a proximity framework for post-war impacts on textile and fashion – Denise N. Rall

Afterword: The military in contemporary fashion – Denise N. Rall

Sujets

Energie & environnement

Télévision

Mode (habillement)

Cultural Studies

General

Engineering

Fashion

Technology

Television

General officer

Sciences et techniques

Power Resources

Informations

Publié par	Intellect Books
Date de parution	01 mars 2014
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781783202935
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,1000€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

First published in the UK in 2014 by
Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2014 by
Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,
Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright © 2014 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Copy-editing: Susanne Hillen
Cover design: Stephanie Sarlos
Cover image: © Stokette, image 111484658, Shutterstock, Inc.
Production manager: Bethan Ball
Typesetting: Contentra Technologies
Print ISBN: 978-1-84150-751-4
ePDF ISBN: 978-1-78320-294-2
ePub ISBN: 978-1-78320-293-5
Printed and bound by Hobbs the Printers Ltd, UK
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Contextualizing fashion and war within popular culture
Jennifer Craik
Overview
Denise N. Rall
Section I: The military in popular culture
Chapter 1: Representation of female wartime bravery in Australia’s Wanda the War Girl and Jane at War from the UK
Jane Chapman
Chapter 2: Fashionable fascism: Cinematic images of the Nazi before and after 9/11
Kylee M. Hartman-Warren
Chapter 3: Branding the muscled male body as military costume
Heather Smith and Richard Gehrmann
Section II: Fashion and the military
Chapter 4: In the service of clothes: Elsa Schiaparelli and the war experience
Annita Boyd
Chapter 5: The discipline of appearance: Military style and Australian flight hostess uniforms 1930–1964
Prudence Black
Chapter 6: Models, medals, and the use of military emblems in fashion
Amanda Laugesen
Section III: Framing youth fashion, textile artworks and postcolonial costume in the context of conflict
Chapter 7: Battle dressed – clothing the criminal, or the horror of the ‘hoodie’ in Britain
Joanne Turney
Chapter 8: Dutch wax and display: London and the art of Yinka Shonibare
Davinia Gregory
Chapter 9: Costume and conquest: Introducing a proximity framework for post-war impacts on textile and fashion
Denise N. Rall
Afterword: The military in contemporary fashion
Denise N. Rall
Contributors
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the Popular Culture Association of Australia and New Zealand (PopCAANZ) for making me welcome at their inaugural conference in Sydney in 2010, and for politely listening to my very much ‘under development’ ideas regarding changes in fashion following the Spanish conquest of Peru. Without the Association, I would not have made the valuable contacts that led to my brilliant list of contributors. Established scholars Vicki Karaminas, Prudence Black and Jo Turney provided leadership from behind the scenes. I especially thank Professor Jennifer Craik, who kindly agreed to introduce the volume.
Further, my contacts at Intellect were no less valuable, with initial enthusiasm from James Campbell, followed by the very hard work and perseverance of production manager Bethan Ball. All of my suggestions (and objections) were heard with great forbearance. I thank Beth especially for the patience and cheerful guidance that she provided throughout the process. Any remaining errors are strictly my own.
As always, I thank my family, Associate Professor J. Doland Nichols, Fran and Louis Rall, and Alyse Rall Benjamin. All of them are writers, variously: poets, scientific authors, and novelists of fantasy fiction. I would be a much poorer scholar without all of their help. I also thank the School of Arts and Social Sciences, Southern Cross University, for providing an adjunct appointment at a critical time in the writing process. Recently, I met Professor Emerita Beverly Gordon, from my former home institution: the University of Wisconsin-Madison. It was inspiring to see her work in the gorgeous volume: Wearing Propaganda: Textiles on the Home Front in Japan, Britain, and the United States (Yale University Press, 2005). The many connections between dress, textiles and war are not unique to this volume.
Finally, I thank my Costume instructors, Jean Ward and Glenda Pierce. I learned much about what it takes to make a garment work. From there, I could take costume forward into the conflicting world of war, and its manifestations in popular culture.
Denise N. Rall
Introduction
Contextualizing fashion and war within popular culture
Jennifer Craik
Fashion and war may seem like odd bedfellows and yet they are closely linked historically and culturally. This exciting volume addresses the relationship between fashion and war in popular culture. It explores diverse issues associated with the ways in which war, colonial occupation, cultural conquest and military dress have influenced and been influenced by fashion and codes of conduct associated with how we dress ourselves.
The pervasiveness of military uniforms in fashion is but one manifestation of this process. Military uniforms, in particular, offer fashion qualities of spectacle, order, repetition and carefully contrived lines and silhouettes while evoking images of discipline, civility and heroism (Craik 2005). The details of military uniforms have appeared again and again in the fashions of the past, leading Diana Vreeland to call uniforms ‘the sportswear of the nineteenth century’ (Answers.com 2000). The powerful signs and symbols can be readily appropriated selectively in the pursuit of fashion and popular culture. As Black argues: ‘The uniform is the clothing of the modern disciplinary society’ (see Black, Chapter 5, in this volume). This is one theme of this collection.
However, Fashion and War in Popular Culture covers more than that. The background to the volume is the complex interplay between war, colonialism, imperialism, postcolonialism and postmodernism. Histories of the cultural conquest of other cultures usually only refer to matters of dress, costume and fashion as an aside – an ephemeral symbol of the process of victory, defeat or pacification. The reality is that fashion is not only the most visible indicator of those processes but a remarkably agile signifier of the twists and turns – and nuances – of cultural conquest. Indeed, it is impossible to understand – or ‘read’ – fashion without knowledge of the context of its appearance. Arguably, history matters more to the understanding of fashion than to other disciplines.
Fashion is the body writ large as a social body that announces its location in time and space. It is also a communicative device that speaks to observers and demands a response and connection. My favourite story about fashion and the body is anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss’ account of how the South American Caduveo Indians appropriated the Spanish Baroque motifs of stripes, spirals and whorls in their body decoration and art. He writes:
After the Indians saw a European warship for the first time, when the Maracanha sailed up the Paraguay in 1857, the sailors noticed the next day that their bodies were covered with anchor-shaped motifs; one Indian even had an officer’s uniform painted in great detail all over his torso – with buttons and stripes, and the sword-belt over the coat-tails (Lévi-Strauss 1976: 243).
Whether this was a case of imitation or coincidence, the example of the painted ‘officer’ illustrates that the Indians recognized the significance of the details of the uniform as markers of identity, status and communication which they sought to replicate through body decoration. Lévi-Strauss goes on to explain how Caduveo art reproduces dualisms that underpin their social organization by creating an aesthetic map of social codes and rules. For a pre-literate society, this provided an accessible way of recoding and transmitting the tenets of culture – akin to Australian Aboriginal dreamtime myths and paintings, Chinese dragon robes of the ruling dynasty, or the knotted cords ( khipu or quipu ) used for record-keeping by the Inkas (see Rall, Chapter 9, in this volume). Is this really any different from the use of military insignia (e.g. epaulettes, brass buttons, khaki or camouflage) in contemporary fashion? Or, even without clothing, contemporary male soldiers present a hyper-masculine and muscled body that in itself becomes a type of uniform (see Smith & Gehrmann, Chapter 3, this volume).We are dressing our bodies to convey precise messages about who we are, where we come from, to whom and where we belong, and what we believe in.
To appreciate the symbolism of fashion, it is necessary to appreciate the complex interplay of influences that shape it. Karen Tranberg Hansen (2010: 155) has differentiated colonialism (rule by an external power) from imperialism (dominating influence over another culture) and the ways in which ‘dress became an important boundary-marking mechanism’ both for the external power and subjugated people (Tranberg Hansen 2010: 156). The former imposes dress codes and western garments which are adopted and adapted to varying degrees though often intermixed with local dress to create new modes of dress. In other words, even where a dress code appears to have been imposed successfully, there are different meanings attached to the clothes by the colonizers and the colonized that reflect the contestation of the rules:
Because the meanings of the dressed body everywhere are ambiguous, the colonial encounter enabled local people to take pride in long-held aesthetics expressed in new dress media and forms. It enabled the creation of styles of “national dress” that as invented traditions have served as cultural assertions for shifting claims to political voice and representation between the late colonial period and the present (Tranberg Hansen 2010: 159).
Perhaps the best example she gives is the adoption of a Prussian-style military uniform with a traditional high Chinese collar by the Chinese in the late 19th cen