Fashion Writing and Criticism: History, Theory, Practice

This is the first book to connect shifts in critical writing and approaches to fashion over a long span of time, from the seventeenth century to the present day. Beginning with the power of Aristotles Poetics, it explains that the plot which is the most important of the six constituent parts of the `tragedy is, after all, story telling, but story telling to be compelling must have drama and embody insights. Why did evaluative thinking emerge at all? What does criticism mean? How did criticism expand beyond the fine arts to the camera and other new media? How did the great critics reflect on the social, artistic and aesthetic changes that revolutionized fashion since the first texts about sartorial dress were published in the first fashion magazines of the late-seventeenth and eighteenth centuries? The role of taste in eighteenth-century philosophical aesthetics will be directly related to assessments of fashion in that period. How did a judicial (evaluative) vocabulary for fashion journalism emerge in the nineteenth century and where did it lead