Fashion and Dress in Visual Culture

Catalog description

Explores fashion and dress from the Renaissance to the modern period and considers dress as commenting on society, gender, race and current events. Explores case studies of art works and of selected decades in European history. Looks at dress in paintings for women, men and children in the context of the ways in which dress variously defined gender, race and class identities, social life and economic wealth in different periods of history. Considers issues of style; changes in clothing production (such as brocades, cotton, silk, furs); and the function of accessories in defining identities in art. Examines fashion magazines, historical events and social change and dress as distinct from fashion. Finally, seeks to understand how art serves to heighten the meaning, display and performance of fashion in terms of the portrait subjects and the intended spectators.