Katarzyna Agnieszka Kociołek
Dress as Metaphor – British
Female Fashion and Social
Change in the 20th Century
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ISSN 2364-2882
ISBN 978-3-631-66004-1 (Print)
E-ISBN 978-3-653-05187-2 (E-Book)
E-ISBN 978-3-631-70955-9 (EPUB)
E-ISBN 978-3-631-70956-6 (MOBI)
DOI 10.3726/978-3-653-05187-2
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About the author
The Author
Katarzyna Agnieszka Kociołek is an assistant professor at the Institute of English Studies, University of Warsaw, Poland. Her doctoral dissertation (2009) examined the representations of ethnic identities in the British visual arts discourse of the 1980s and 1990s. Her research interests include the representation of identities and the visual culture, which incorporates fashion, film and visual arts.
About the book
Katarzyna Agnieszka Kociołek
Dress as Metaphor – British Female Fashionand Social Change in the 20th Century
This book traces the interconnectedness of women’s sartorial practices and social change in 20th-century Britain. Based on a wide range of cultural texts, which include literary works, magazines, posters, advertisements and political cartoons, this study endeavours to prove that due to the metaphorical function of clothing, womenswear imparted significant information about women’s positions in society during transformative historical moments.
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This edition of the eBook can be cited. To enable this we have marked the start and end of a page. In cases where a word straddles a page break, the marker is placed inside the word at exactly the same position as in the physical book. This means that occasionally a word might be bifurcated by this marker.
Women’s fashion is always a statement about women’s roles and how they are or should be performed (Crane 1999, 61)
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am extremely grateful to my colleagues at the Institute of English Studies (University of Warsaw) who have read drafts of the chapters. In particular I would like to thank Professor Barry Keane for his advice, encouragement and revisions. Also, I would like to thank faculty members of the Research Institute for Literature and Cultural History at Liverpool John Moores University who offered comments on early versions of some fragments of the book.
Because small sections of chapters two, three and five have already been published as articles, I would like to thank anonymous reviewers for all the suggestions that helped to improve the chapters’ final shape.
A special note of thanks for the intellectual stimulation and inspiration should be extended to undergraduate and graduate students of the Institute of English Studies who have attended my course on Fashion and Social Change in Britain in the 20th century as well as my MA and BA seminars on visual culture.
Finally I would like to thank my family – my parents, my husband and my sons – without whose support and patience I could not have finished this book.
CONTENTS
1.1 Fashion as Communication
1.2 Identity Formation Through Fashion: Gender, Class, Subculture, Age
2 THE METAPHORS WE LIVE IN – DRESS AS A METAPHOR
2.1 Conceptual Metaphor Theory and Fashion
2.2 Seeing Through Clothes – Fashion as Metaphor in Visual Culture
3.1 Fashionable Suffragettes
3.2 The Flappers and Their (Mis)representation in the British Media
4 THE UNIFORMED FEMINITY OF THE WARTIME FASHIONS
4.1 Civilians in Uniforms – Sartorial Representations of Female Identity During the WWI
4.2 Utility Fashion and Military Women of WWII
5 THE POST-WAR SUBCULTURAL REBELLION AND WOMEN’S FASHION OF THE TEDDY GIRLS, MODS AND PUNKS
5.1 The Teds
6 ANTI-FASHION OF THE SECOND WAVE FEMINISM
6.1 British Second-Wave Feminism, Spare Rib, and Fashion