Böcker av Patrizia Calefato

Luxury has been both celebrated and condemned throughout history right up to the present day. This groundbreaking text examines luxury and its relationship with desire, status, consumption and economic value, exploring why luxury remains prominent even in the context of a global recession.Using approaches from cultural studies, semiotic research and aesthetics, Luxurypresents a wide range of case studies including urban space and new technologies, travel, interior design, cars, fashion ads and jewellery to explore what luxury represents, and why, in the contemporary world. The book will be essential reading for students and scholars across a range of fashion studies, cultural studies and sociology, and anyone interested in the power and allure of luxury today.

Fashion is a system through which individual and collective representations of body and identity are made. Covers, garments and decorations on the skin create the body, forge it in its being in the world. The clothed body is a combination of signs which include garments, hair-style, make-up, tattoos, and decorations: in other words, everything that makes the body a cultural element and not simply a natural element. Time and language are the main forms of fashion: through fashion we ¿see¿ how time passes, and fashion ¿speaks¿ via its multiple signs. As an example, let¿s think of how the tight connection between music cultures, sub-cultural styles and fashions in the Sixties changed the perception of fashion itself in daily life: miniskirts, jeans and casual clothes became, at the same time, the symbol of an era, as well as of the ¿timeless¿ features of culture and imagination. Fashion has a twofold nature: on the one hand, it marks the contact areas between the clothes and the body activating the senses; on the other hand, it places the individual¿s body within the social one.

What we wear is a vehicle for the expression of politics, gender and identity, placing clothing at the root of a complex set of messages. This book shows how semiotics can provide a convincing template for understanding dress in a range of contexts and is a useful reading for anyone interested in the meaning of what we wear.