From Style Rookie to Style Bubble, personal style blogs exploded onto the scene in the mid-2000s giving voice to young and stylish writers who had their own unique take on the seasonal fashion cycle and how to curate an individual style within the shifting swirl of trends. Personal Style Blogs examines the history and rise of style blogging and looks closely at the relationship between bloggers and their (often anonymous) readers as well as the response of the fashion industry to style bloggers’ amateur and often unauthorized fashion reportage.

The book charts the development of the style blogosphere and its transformation from an alternative, experimental space to one dominated by the fashion industry. Complete with examples of several famous fashion bloggers, such as Susie Lau, Rumi Neely and Tavi Gevinson, the author explores notions of individuality, aesthetics and performance on both sides of the digital platform. Findlay asks: what can style blogging teach us about women’s writing and the performance of a private self online? And what drives style bloggers to carve a space for themselves online?

Style is predominantly an individual matter – the way people put themselves together creates a sense of individual identity – but collectively it creates a sense of common culture in a community, a city or a country. Geographically isolated from the fashion hubs of Paris and New York, Australia may not yet be synonymous with style. But as it moves away from the beach look that it is usually associated with and adopts haute couture, Australia is emerging as a shining star in the Southern Hemisphere. Though not the political capital of the country, Sydney is nevertheless Australia’s cultural capital, and the style hub and epicentre of the country’s fashion evolution. Sydney Street Style depicts the style of this less-explored fashion capital. Beautifully assembled and packed with full-colour photos of the stylish and eclectic residents of Sydney, this book will be a welcome addition to the library of any fashionista or armchair traveller.

It was a scene that had many names: some original members referred to themselves as punks, others, new romantics, new wavers, the bats or the morbids. 'Goth' did not gain lexical currency until the late 1980s. But no matter what term was used, 'postpunk' encompasses all the incarnations of the 1980s alternative movement. Some Wear Leather, Some Wear Lace is a visual and oral history of the first decade of the scene. Featuring interviews with both the performers and the audience to capture the community on and off stage, the book places personal snapshots alongside professional photography to reveal a unique range of fashions, bands and scenes.



A book about the music, the individual and the creativity of a worldwide community rather than theoretical definitions of a subculture, Some Wear Leather, Some Wear Lace considers a subject not often covered by academic books. Whether you were part of the scene or are just fascinated by different modes of expression, this book will transport you to another time and place.

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.

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 in consuming green cosmetics or ethical culinary trends and the discursive strategies of denial of the extreme cruelty in the procurement of animal skin and fur for use in fashion, Fashion and Ethics applies its uncompromising scrutiny to all areas of fashion. Throughout, the volume forces readers to confront the question: Does ethical fashion go deep enough into challenging unethical behaviour or is it just a charade of good intentions?

Shanghai Street Style marks the inaugural volume in an exciting new street style series from Intellect. With an array of up-and-coming young designers like Coko Wan, Nio and Helen Lee, Shanghai is swiftly cementing its status as a global fashion destination – its first fashion week was in 2011 – and this book brings together more than one hundred full-colour photographs showcasing the remarkable diversity of styles seen on its streets. Alongside the photographs are short pieces of critical commentary by Vicki Karaminas and Toni Johnson-Woods, shedding light on the city's changing culture and how this is expressed through the clothing choices of ordinary city-dwellers going about their daily routines. The result is a stunning street-level look at the trends shaping Shanghai's fascinating fashion scene, with interesting echoes of East meets West and old meets new.

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 identity. Their collective efforts contribute to the journal’s mission: the examination of fashion and beauty systems as symbolic spaces of production, reproduction, representation, and communication of artifacts; meanings; social practices; and renditions of cloth, clothing, and appearance. Critical Studies in Fashion and Beauty will therefore interest scholars of fashion and anyone looking for an introduction to this dynamic area of inquiry.

When political and civil unrest threatened France’s social order in the 1950s, French cinema provided audiences a unique form of escapism from such troubled times: a nostalgic look back to the France of the nineteenth century, with costume dramas set in the age of Napoleon and the Belle Époque. Film critics, however, have routinely dismissed this period of French cinema, overlooking a very important period of political cultural history. French Costume Drama of the 1950s redresses this balance, exploring a diverse range of films including Guitry’s Napoléon (1955), Vernay’s Le Comte de Monte Cristo (1943), and Becker’s Casque d’Or (1952) to expose the political cultural paradox between nostalgia for a lost past and the drive for modernization.