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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.
List of contents
List of Illustrations
Introduction
Chapter One: AssaultBeauty Doctoring: Advertising Violence and Femininity
Colour: The Assault of Modernity
Fighting Back: Elsa Schiaparelli
Chapter Two: FragmentationDividing the Mind and Body
Fragmented Modernity in the City
Beauty, Art, and the Isolated Eye
The Classical versus Fragmented Body
Chapter Three: EroticismExploring Eroticism
Fashion, Femininity, and Fetishism
Eroticising the Body
Chapter Four: AbsenceFashion and Mourning
Sinister Shadows
Death on the Body
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
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.
Summary
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.
Additional text
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.
