Overview

British fashion is currently enjoying unprecedented international success, with swinging London' hailed as a centre for creativity and innovation, and British designers such as Alexander McQueen and John Galliano recruited by renowned fashion houses such as Givenchy and Dior. British Fashion Design is an insightful and informative investigation of the British fashion industry, focusing on the young designers whose work is rapturously received in the international market, but who often struggle at the brink of bankruptcy at home. Angela McRobbie traces the careers of young designers, from graduation from art school to entry into the industry, designing for their own labels or serving apprenticeships for established houses in Milan, Paris or New York. She discusses how these designers negotiate the tension between fashion as art form and the demands of a ruthlessly commercial industry, and how designers both come out of and draw their inspiration from youth street culture. In analysing the economic, ideological and artistic working of this pre-eminent cultural industry, British Fashion Design draws on interviews with young fashion designers and with others working in the fash biz' which surrounds and markets their products - stylists, fashion writers, magazine editors and retailers.

Full Product Details

9780415057806

Table of Contents

Reviews

This book extends the important work Angela McRobbie has done over the past decades in studying young women's subcultures and popular women's magazines to help feminize British cultural studies. The book is instructive not only about the struggles of young women to become 'new cultural workers' under the Thatcherite regime of enterprise culture, but also about the relative strengths and weaknesses of a type of social analysis whose growing popularity poses a challenge to disciplinary sociology. <br>-- Mark Jacobs, American Journal of Sociology <br>

British Fashion Design is a diligent and illumination sociological study of the careers of fashion designers. McRobbie has made out a strong case for attending more closely to cultural production - Jim McGuigan, New Times 'McRobbie is to be congratulated on providing business historians with a perspective on the fashion industry her book is well written and the organisation of the material is faultless.' - Katrina Honeyman, Business History, 41(3) 'A fascinating and skillfully narrated story of a creative workforce and its relation to contemporary British capitalism ... a wonderfully readable addition to any undergraduate course on contemporary industries, or on gender and employment.' - Nina Wakeford, Work, Employment and Society, June 2000

Author Information

Angela McRobbie

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available