Danger in the Path of Chic: Violence in Fashion between the Wars

by Lucy Moyse Ferreira

Overview

During the interwar years, a proliferation of violence encroached upon the glossy, idealistic world of fashion: from the curiously common appearance of dismembered heads in fashion illustration, to seemingly torturous techniques and devices advertised by beauty imagery, even extending to garments designed to look assaulted and destroyed. Danger in the Path of Chic brings this disturbing imagery to light for the first time, proposing new directions for historians of fashion, violence and culture in the interwar years.

Concentrating on London, Paris and New York as fashion centres and political allies, the volume explores why horror manifested itself in this way, at this time, and in a sphere that is usually perceived as being built on fantasy and escape. In doing so, Danger in the Path of Chic situates fashion within the very real social, psychological, economic and political traumas of the period.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781350126305
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Publishing
Publication date:	12/02/2021
Series:	Fashion: Visual & Material Interconnections
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	240
File size:	7 MB

About the Author

Lucy Moyse Ferreira is Lecturer in Fashion Media and Digital Innovation at London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London, UK.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations

Introduction

Chapter One: Assault
Beauty Doctoring: Advertising Violence and Femininity
Colour: The Assault of Modernity
Fighting Back: Elsa Schiaparelli

Chapter Two: Fragmentation
Dividing the Mind and Body
Fragmented Modernity in the City
Beauty, Art, and the Isolated Eye
The Classical versus Fragmented Body

Chapter Three: Eroticism
Exploring Eroticism
Fashion, Femininity, and Fetishism
Eroticising the Body

Chapter Four: Absence
Fashion and Mourning
Sinister Shadows
Death on the Body

Conclusion

Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

A fascinating discussion of fashion's transformations in the period ... This book gets to the heart of what fashion was about, then and for the decades that followed.” —Journal of Design History

“In this fascinating and highly readable book, Lucy Moyse Ferreira connects fashion to war, politics, psychoanalysis and art, showing how a sense of historical crisis permeated every aspect of fashion in the interwar years, from beauty advertising to haute couture.” —Caroline Evans, Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, UK

“With lively and sophisticated writing, Danger in the Path of Chic offers a valuable transnational study of women's fashion and beauty in the interwar years. Moyse Ferreira's interweaving of psychoanalysis with other art movements reflects the trauma of the time period and how high-fashion provided an avenue by which to process those terrors.” —Elizabeth Matelski, Endicott College, USA

“With her psychoanalytic discussion of the interwar period, Lucy Moyse Ferreira smartly dissects a wide array of media (including art, fashion, literature, advertising, film, and more). Showing how the violence of World War II consistently lingered throughout the Western World, she successfully argues that a threatening sensibility affected women's bodies and their display in public through overt and coded means. Moyse Ferreira manages to weave a number of disparate media to create a coherent and synthesized view of the undercurrent of violence in women's experiences in the dark spaces between the major world wars.” —Emily Newman, Texas A&M University-Commerce, USA

From the Publisher