Producing fashion : commerce, culture, and consumers / edited by Regina Lee Blaszczyk.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

How has Paris, the world's fashion capital, influenced Milan, New York, and Tokyo? When did the Marlboro Man become a symbol of American masculinity? Why do Americans love to dress down in high-tech Lycra fabrics, while they wax nostalgic for quaint, old-fashioned Victorian cottages?
Fashion icons and failures have long captivated the general public, but few scholars have examined the historical role of business and commerce in creating the international market for style goods. Producing Fashion is a groundbreaking collection of original essays that shows how economic institutions in Europe and North America laid the foundation for the global fashion system and sustained it commercially through the mechanisms of advertising, licensing, marketing, publishing, and retailing.
The collection reveals how public and private institutions--from government censors in imperial Russia to large corporations in the United States--worked to shape fashion, style, and taste with varying degrees of success. Fourteen contributors draw on original research and fresh insight into the producers of fashion--advertising agents, architects, corporate executives, department stores, designers, editors, government officials, hairdressers, haute couturiers, and Web retailers--in their bid for influence, acclaim, and shoppers' dollars.
Producing Fashion looks to the past, revealing the rationale behind style choices, while explaining how the interplay of custom, invented traditions, and sales imperatives continue to drive innovation in the fashion industries.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Chapter 1 Rethinking Fashion (p. 1)
• Part I Organizing the Fashion Trades
• Chapter 2 Spreading the Word: The Development of the Russian Fashion Press (p. 21)
• Chapter 3 Accessorizing, Italian Style: Creating a Market for Milan's Fashion Merchandise (p. 42)
• Chapter 4 In the Shadow of Paris? French Haute Couture and Belgian Fashion Between the Wars (p. 62)
• Chapter 5 Licensing Practices at Maison Christian Dior (p. 82)
• Part II Inventing Fashions, Promoting Styles
• Chapter 6 The Wiener Werkst&aumlet;tte and the Reform Impulse (p. 111)
• Chapter 7 American Fashions for American Women: The Rise and Fall of Fashion Nationalism (p. 130)
• Chapter 8 Coiffing Vanity: Advertising Celluloid Toilet Sets in 1920s America (p. 150)
• Part III Shaping Bodies, Building Brands
• Chapter 9 California Casual: Lifestyle Marketing and Men's Leisurewear, 1930-1960 (p. 169)
• Chapter 10 Marlboro Men: Outsider Masculinities and Commercial Modeling in Postwar America (p. 187)
• Chapter 11 The Body and the Brand: How Lycra Shaped America (p. 207)
• Part IV Customer Reactions, Consumer Adaptations
• Chapter 12 French Hairstyles and the Elusive Consumer (p. 231)
• Chapter 13 Ripping Up the Uniform Approach: Hungarian Women Piece Together a New Communist Fashion (p. 250)
• Chapter 14 Why the Old-Fashioned Is in Fashion in American Houses (p. 273)
• Notes (p. 293)
• List of Contributors (p. 349)
• Index (p. 353)
• Acknowledgments (p. 365)

Author notes provided by Syndetics