Final published version
Research output: Contribution in Book/Report/Proceedings - With ISBN/ISSN › Chapter
Research output: Contribution in Book/Report/Proceedings - With ISBN/ISSN › Chapter
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TY - CHAP
T1 - Fashion
T2 - Decadent Stylings
AU - Spooner, Catherine
PY - 2021/10/31
Y1 - 2021/10/31
N2 - Fashion is perhaps the ultimate decadent medium: fashionable dress has been critiqued by moralists for extravagance, luxury and sexual licentiousness since classical times. This chapter focuses on fashion since the industrial revolution, when mass textile production and the rapid dissemination of Parisian styles across Europe and America enabled the development of a rapidly changing fashion system. It shows how, within emergent modernity, decadent dress was characterised by its embrace of artifice; this reached its apotheosis in dandyism and the cult of extraordinary individuality; whereby sartorial expression is used to make the body into a work of art. The chapter examines the gendering of decadent fashion and the figure of the female dandy; and finally appraises the contemporary fashion industry’s embrace of beauty in decay. It concludes that far from an evacuation of moral responsibility, fashion’s decadence may be a means of astute political commentary.
AB - Fashion is perhaps the ultimate decadent medium: fashionable dress has been critiqued by moralists for extravagance, luxury and sexual licentiousness since classical times. This chapter focuses on fashion since the industrial revolution, when mass textile production and the rapid dissemination of Parisian styles across Europe and America enabled the development of a rapidly changing fashion system. It shows how, within emergent modernity, decadent dress was characterised by its embrace of artifice; this reached its apotheosis in dandyism and the cult of extraordinary individuality; whereby sartorial expression is used to make the body into a work of art. The chapter examines the gendering of decadent fashion and the figure of the female dandy; and finally appraises the contemporary fashion industry’s embrace of beauty in decay. It concludes that far from an evacuation of moral responsibility, fashion’s decadence may be a means of astute political commentary.
KW - fashion
KW - Decadence
KW - Victorian culture
KW - Dandyism
KW - style
KW - subculture
KW - gender
KW - race
KW - dress
KW - beauty
KW - class
U2 - 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190066956.013.29
DO - 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190066956.013.29
M3 - Chapter
BT - The Oxford Handbook of Decadence
A2 - Desmarais, Jane
A2 - Weir, David
PB - Oxford University Press
CY - Oxford
ER -