Fashion Book Friday: Fashion Revivals. From the Elizabethan Age to the Present Day by Barbara Bains

 

    This is my archive of fashion related books. Most of them are in English, but many are not. Some are new, but many are real finds. Depends on the topic, really...

      One of my all-time favourites, Fashion Revivals is, I think, still an extremely useful and interesting book. While it it too old (edited in 1980) to feature the 21st century´s obsession with all things vintage, it is still unsurpassed in its analysis of the phenomen of "revival" in fashion. Extremely methodical in its structures, it looks at four different types of revivals: 

 Antiquity, that is, all things Greek and Roman; Exotic Revival, everything from far away, the further the better; Rural revival, with rural styles and imagery (on the left, the Duchess of Queensberry pretends to know exactly what it is a milkmaid actually does. And yes, almost all images are in black and white. Pretty normal for a book from that time, but of course a drawback, especially in images such as this, where colour plays a huge role).
The last chapter, Historical revivals, comes closer to what we would consider vintage, but encompasses everything from "medieval" to"what my mum wore".
  Each chapter is then divided by epoch: 16th, 17th, 18th, 19th and 20th century, which allows to show exactly how apparently fix concepts, such as "Greek gods" or "Orientalism" change through time. Because there is a difference when a 16th-century Englishman, who lives in an ambitious, but ultimately insignificant kingdom at the edge of Europe, dresses in Persian dress, dreaming of unlimited (and unavalaible) riches and power, or when a 19th-century British officer dresses in the garb of the conquered "noble savages".

     It might look similar to a casual observer, but political and economical power have shifted so much, and with them the symbolical content of the garments. Similarly complex notions hide behind noblewomen who dress like peasants, or in portrait on the right. It´s Victoria and Albert, dressed as medieval kings. Now, the Victorians had an obsession with all things medieval, as the ideal of a simpler, purer and more truthful age - the Pre-Raphaelites chose "before Raphael" as an ideal for a reason. But, when two monarchs whose power is seriously curtailed by Parliament, dress like kings who considered themselves responsible only to God, there is also a political implication here - it remained without consequence, of course, but the ambition for absolute power is still there.




   While Fashion Revivals is not really a coffee-table book - there is too much text and most images are in black and white and on the smaller side - it is an excellent, in-depth study of the connections between fashion and politics. While there are newer books on some of the topics it covers - I have already reviewed one on Orientalism, there is nothing that I know of, that quite compares in both scope and love of detail.