Overview

Yuniya Kawamura is assistant professor of sociology at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York. She is the author of Fashion-ology: An Introduction to Fashion Studies and the contributor to the Encyclopedia of Clothing of Fashion edited by Valerie Steele and Joanne Eicher. She is currently conducting fieldwork on Japanese Streetstyle in Tokyo and New York, and also working on the Japanese translation of Fetish: Fashion, Sex, and Power written by Valerie Steele. Fashion can be treated as a system of interlocking institutions, organizations, groups, practices, individuals and events that together produce the social phenomenon grouped under the rubric of 'fashion'. The hegemony of French fashion is a function of the fashion system which emerged in the mid-nineteenth century with the couturier Charles Frederick Worth. This study demonstrates how this fashion system works to legitimate designers as creative artists and their creations as fashionable, and its empirical base is an analysis of the entry of Japanese designers into the French fashion system in the 1970s and 1980s, a period when Haute Couture was losing much of its customary client base. The avant-garde Japanese designers (Issey Miyake, Yohji Yamamoto and Rei Kawakubo) and Hanae Mori illustrate different types of relationships to the system. The integration of these foreign designers shows how the French system persists through adaptation and change. The combined presence of the Japanese designers in Paris appeared to shake the very foundations of the established fashion capital, but in fact, they have reinforced the French supremacy of fashion. Participating in the French fashion earned them the social, economic and symbolic capital that they were able to differentiate themselves from other Japanese designers without these resources.

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9781859738115

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'Way deeper than your average issue of Vogue. Essential reading for students and fashion historians.' The Guardian'A fine addition to academic institutions with cultural studies programs; essential for those with special collections in fashionand costume.' Library Journal'Fashion Theory is both chic and serious - yes, and sexy, too. There is much here to interest students of art, history, design, cultural studies, sociology, art history and anthropology.' Times Higher Education Supplement'Fascinating to serious fashion and anthropology students.' Time Out

'Way deeper than your average issue of Vogue. Essential reading for students and fashion historians.' The Guardian 'A fine addition to academic institutions with cultural studies programs; essential for those with special collections in fashionand costume.' Library Journal 'Fashion Theory is both chic and serious - yes, and sexy, too. There is much here to interest students of art, history, design, cultural studies, sociology, art history and anthropology.' Times Higher Education Supplement 'Fascinating to serious fashion and anthropology students.' Time Out

Author Information

Valerie Steele Director, The Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology.

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