Los Angeles is undergoing a makeover. Leaving behind its image as all freeways and suburbs, sunshine and noir, it is reinventing itself for the twenty-first century as a walkable, pedestrian friendly, ecologically healthy and global urban hotspot of fashion and style,  while driving initiatives to rejuvenate its downtown core, public spaces and ethnic neighborhoods. By providing a locational history of Los Angeles fashion and style mythologies through the lens of institutions such as manufacturing, museums and designers and readings of contemporary film, literature and new media, L.A. Chic provides an in-depth analysis of the social changes, urban processes, desires and politics that inform how the good life is being re-imagined in Los Angeles.

 

Throughout the book, Susan Ingram and Markus Reisenleitner dig up submerged and marginalized elements of the city’s cultural history but also tap into the global circuits of urban affect that are being mobilized for promoting L.A. as an example for the global, multi-ethnic city of the future. Engagingly written, highly visual and featuring numerous photographs throughout, L.A. Chic will appeal to any culturally inclined reader with an interest in Los Angeles, its cultural history and modern urban style.

Vienna may not be synonymous with fashion like its metropolitan counterparts Paris and Milan, but it is a fashionable city, one that historically has been structured by changing fashions and fashionable appearances. Like the Litfaßsäule in Orson Welles’s 1949 urban noir masterpiece The Third Man, into which Harry Lime escapes in order to avoid capture and which hapless visitors today presume are merely surfaces for advertising, there are many overlooked aspects of Vienna’s distinct style and attitude. By focusing on fashion, Wiener Chic narrates Vienna’s history through an interpretation of the material dimensions of Viennese cultural life – from architecture to arts festivals to the urban fabric of street chic.

The first book that connects Vienna and fashion with urban theory, Wiener Chic draws on material that is virtually unknown in an English-language context to give readers an insider’s vantage point on an under-appreciated European fashion capital.