Critical Studies in Fashion and Beauty brings together articles from the first volume of this cutting-edge journal--which is also the first of its kind in the field. Taken together, the pieces collected here offer a snapshot of critical debate in fashion, a growing area of scholarly interest. The volume's contributors, who come from disciplines across the humanities and social sciences, explore such topics as fashion trends in a global context, including contemporary Italian fashion identity, the kimono's metamorphoses, the dynamics of luxury and basic fashion after the recent economic crisis, and the negotiation through fashion of social class and feminine id ..

Fashion and Ethics focuses on issues of power, social positioning, and practices among creators, producers, practitioners, wearers, and consumers of fashion. With a special emphasis on the moral fabric of clothing, contributors to the book offer a critique of some of the fundamental assumptions of ethical fashion and expose how products are often framed as fair trade in order to relieve consumers' guilt. With essays that problematize issues such as ethical fashion's self-appointed morality, the first-world notion that the environment should take priority over human development, the conflict between business profit and ethics, the unintended agendas involved i ..

Fashion as Masquerade focuses on issues of power, social positioning, ideologies, and practices within the web of relationships between creators, producers, practitioners, and end users of fashion. Masking has a rich history but it is also a metaphor for fashion itself. Fashion is a mask that constructs or subverts meanings. To construct meanings it needs control over what people can wear, and over the gaze that interprets the meanings of what they wear. Exploring the contemporary meanings of masks, masking, and masquerade, essays here consider masking in its various forms as a conscious or unconscious form of behavior. Masking is revealed as a strategy for r ..