Color speaks a powerful cultural language, displaying political, sexual, and economic messages that, throughout history, have shown how we relate to ourselves and our world. This ground-breaking collection is the first to interrogate how color’s manifestation through fashionable and ceremonial dress has played a significant role in the formation of society, performing dialogues of social acceptance and exclusion, convention and subversion.
From the use of white in pioneering feminism and the French postwar penchant for black, to mystical scarlet broadcloth and the transformation of arsenic-laden green from consumer favorite to sexual deviant, this book shows that color in dress is never straightforward and is as mutable, nuanced, and varied as color itself. Divided into four thematic parts – solidarity, power, innovation, and desire – each section highlights the often violent, emotional, and complex histories of color in dress across geographical, temporal and cultural boundaries. In this ground-breaking publication, color is analyzed as an agent for social change, stratification, and consolidation, and shows that underlying our contemporary relaxed attitude to color lays a chromatic complexity that speaks of wars, migrations, economic ascendancy, and decline.
While acknowledging the important role that technology has had to play in the development of new dyes, this collection explores color as an agent for technical innovation that continues to inspire designers, artists, and performers today as it did in the past. Bringing together cutting-edge contributions from leading scholars, it is essential reading for students and researchers of fashion, textiles, design, cultural studies, art history, and material culture.
