Dress History

Students of dress history will benefit from reading this book from cover to cover. Each chapter provides insight into fascinating topics, while as a whole the book is a solid illustration of how different approaches within dress history rub alongside, borrow from and bounce off one another; it leads by example encouraging readers to be brave — apply multi-source and material culture enquiry, embrace a broad mind-set, and bring new methods to their subject ... This book supports and promotes a continuation of dress historians as passionate, rigorous and all-embracing scholars. * Costume *
This important collection breaks through familiar boundaries of writings on dress – in terms of time and place and with an admirable diversity of approach. Focused studies offer insights on topics that, thanks to their specificity, paradoxically enlarge the sphere of knowledge of dress. It is excellent for students; each chapter serves as a model of exemplary scholarship conveyed in authoritative but very readable language. * Nancy B. Deihl, New York University, USA *
Dress History: New Directions in Theory and Practice is an engaging collection of essays that address the etymology and methodology of the burgeoning field of dress history. This book is a must read for all fashion and dress historians. * Clare Sauro, Drexel University, USA *
This study of dress, from many points of view, serves to acknowledge the contribution and application of object study to the cultural understanding of dress. * Jean L. Druesedow, Director of Kent State University Museum, USA *
This book, edited by Pollen and Nicklas, eminent scholars of dress and appearance theory and history, powerfully argues that the field’s maturity has delineated a new position for the field, one far from the borders of scholarship. It provides new research and methods, and importantly the book defines multiple avenues for the field’s further forward movement. It features case studies of marginal and silent areas of dress history, examines the critical role of interdisciplinarity, and with brilliant clarity stakes a claim for the field’s centrality to humanistic studies. For scholars and serious students of dress and appearance theory and history, this book is a must read. * Abby Lillethun, Montclair State University, USA *