Books in the Studies in Design and Material Culture series

This illustrated survey of 600 years of fashion investigates its cultural and social meanings from medieval Europe to 20th-century America. It provides a guide to the changes in style and taste, showing that clothes have always played a pivotal role in defining a sense of identity and society.

This book productively contests the supposedly exclusive feminine aspect of the style moderne (Art Deco). Through a sustained focus on the figure of the dandy, the books claims an essential role and place of the male body and masculinity in the history of Art Deco. -- .

This is a timely exploration of the traffic between design and activism in the context of precarity - a social and material condition brought about by the growth of temporary, informal and irregular work. The book shows how design objects and practices open up possibilities to recode and reconfigure the effects of precarity. -- .

This book explores the origins of interior design in nineteenth-century France. It shows how new, modern techniques of image-making and reproduction enabled the still-unnamed profession of the interior designer to take shape. -- .

This book offers a new perspective on the history of Soviet design. It argues that the 'comradely objects' of Russian productivism were not just shabby copies of western commodities - they were agents of progressive social relations with a discernible inheritance from the 1920s avant-garde. -- .

This book aims to explore the designed landscapes associated with factories and corporations in the UK and US created since the industrial revolution. It is largely historical, focusing on the period between 1890 and 1930 but it comes right up to date with initiatives such as secret gardens and vegetable allotments at the London Google offices. -- .

Hot Metal focuses on the experience of Australian print-workers between the 1960s and 1980s, concentrating on labour, production, design and culture in the context of deindustrialisation. -- .

This volume brings together many aspects of the Tapestry: the practical skills involved in making the embroidery, aspects of its iconography, its first documented association with Bayeux in an inventory of 1476, its later copying and reproduction in different media and its role as a model for the production of stitched narrative friezes today. -- .

Explores the relationship between industry and the visual arts in the long nineteenth century, using new research to reveal surprising collaborations between craftspeople, inventors, engineers and educators. -- .

A critical reassessment of chinoiserie, a style both praised and derided for its triviality, prettiness, and ornamental excesses -- .

The first work to survey dress around the world, covering consumption, ethnicity, gender and the body, as well as anthropological accounts and studies of representation. The book also examines international western style dress, headwear, ethnicity, traditional dress, 'alternative' dressing, and T-shirts as markers of identity. -- .

An in-depth discussion of the recent historiography of the Independent Group, examining its history from the alternative perspective of popular culture -- .

Material relations tells the story of nineteenth and early twentieth century middle-class families by exploring the domestic spaces they inhabited and the material goods they prized. By opening the doors of the house, the book sheds new light on aspects of family life including love, marriage, sex, childhood and death. -- .

Focussing on the consumer demand for goods in Renaissance Italy, The Material Renaissance establishes the dynamic social character of exchange. It demonstrates that the cost of goods, including the price of the most basic items, was largely contingent upon on the relationship between buyer and seller. -- .

First full-length study on the 1951 Festival of Britain. An examination of how Britain and Britishness were portrayed in the 1951's Festival's exhibitions and events. Covers the Festival's history and historiography, purpose, representations of the future and past, the role of London and the 'local', the British Empire and finally its legacy. -- .

This fascinating collection provides a chronologically arranged set of case studies looking at how interior design has constantly redefined itself as a manifestation of culture, from the eighteenth century to the present day.

This book tells the story of critical avant-garde design in Japan. It challenge the characterisation of Japanese design as beautiful, sublime or a simple product of 'Japanese culture', and reveal the ways in which material and visual culture can serve to voice protest and formulate social critique. -- .

Drawing on research and models from anthropology, material culture and art history, this study explores topics as diverse as Inka stonework, cork platforms for shoes and the Christian Eucharist. -- .

This innovative volume explores how individuals understood production processes in new ways during the eighteenth century. It examines a series of different groups - consumers, retailers, designers, manufacturers and workers - to show how their means of perceiving production changed in this period. In doing so, it reorients current discussions of consumption and production to see them as interrelated entities. At the same time, it underscores the importance of materiality to understandings of eighteenth-century consumer culture. As such, it moves beyond taste, desire and novelty to reveal how objects acted as conduits through which people living in Georgian Britain could examine the material world and the processes and knowledge that rendered it. Primarily bought in retail spaces, ceramic objects were more than fashionable commodities, they were also pieces of clay that had been shaped, fired and decorated. How then did contemporaries conceive of such materiality? Combining material culture and visual culture approaches, this volume shows how consumers made use of different representations of production to understand manufacturing and making. By also exploring how retailers, designers, manufacturers and workers conceived of production processes, the contested nature of such understandings begin to emerge. In marking out the sites upon which these groups disputed ideas about production, this study makes an important contribution to assessing how people in eighteenth-century Britain explored the labour, materials, knowledge and skills that constituted the material world around them.

Drawing on research and models from anthropology, material culture and art history, this study explores topics as diverse as Inka stonework, cork platforms for shoes and the Christian Eucharist. -- .

It is a book that provides new insights into the established discourses of British motoring, exposing the importance of advertising campaigns and motoring journals and addressing issues prompted by new models, ownership and the motoring landscape. -- .

Offers a retrospective view of the development of popular taste and the beginnings of a different phase in the rise of the consumer society in the post second world war period through a series of accounts of developments in modern design history.

This study focuses on the significance of the displays of stained glass at several international exhibitions held in Britain, France, the USA and Australia between 1851 and 1900. It provides new perspectives for the study of nineteenth-century stained glass, within these temporary secular exhibition contexts. -- .

This book examines the cultural impact of colonialism on both colonizer and colonized via analysis of the domestic interiors and public spaces of empire within the Indian Subcontinent, contrasting representations of such spaces within contemporary discourse with analysis of the evidence of actual interiors and the social practices there engendered. -- .

Focusing on the house-building boom of the interwar years, when Britain became a nation of homeowners, this book investigates the ways in which ordinary people expressed new class and gender identities through the design, architecture and decoration of their homes. -- .

What role does the craftsman play on the professional life of the designer? Is the craft of design threatened with deskilling by technology? These are among the questions discussed in this collection of essays about the relevance and place of handcraft in the late 20th century.

Carefully considers the complicated relationships between the modern queer bachelor and interior design, material culture and aesthetics in Britain between 1885 and 1957 -- .

Explores the relationship between industry and the visual arts in the long nineteenth century, using new research to reveal surprising collaborations between craftspeople, inventors, engineers and educators. -- .

This volume examines the cultural history of the fashion industry in the postwar era. Taking an original, interdisciplinary approach, it focuses on the internal culture of the trade, explaining the significance of value creation and assessing the transformation of local industries into global brands. -- .