Carnival to Catwalk: Global Reflections on Fancy Dress Costume
- Submitting institution
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Manchester Metropolitan University
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 247492
- Type
- A - Authored book
- DOI
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10.5040/9781350015029
- Publisher
- Bloomsbury Visual Arts
- ISBN
- 9781350014992
- Open access status
- Out of scope for open access requirements
- Month of publication
- February
- Year of publication
- 2020
- URL
-
-
- Supplementary information
-
-
- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
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D - Fashion
- Proposed double-weighted
- Yes
- Double-weighted statement
- This monograph, the first scholarly study of fancy dress costume, is a distillation of five years of research in international archives, libraries, and museums. It uses a diverse range of primary material, including garments, interviews, paintings and poetry, along with texts unavailable in English translation. Covering a thousand-year period from the Middle Ages to modernity and comparing diverse global communities, it contributes to discussions about the communication of dress. It argues that the peripheral nature of fancy dress makes it adept at revealing social norms and advocates for academics, across multiple disciplines, to engage critically with this sartorial form.
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- This monograph, published by an internationally respected academic press (Bloomsbury), provides the first scholarly study of fancy dress costume. Covering a thousand-year period from the Middles Ages to modernity, and analysing fancy dress traditions across diverse global communities, Wild’s book makes the case for academics to adopt a critical and continuous engagement with a sartorial form that is longstanding yet marginalised in scholarly discussions. Explaining how an ephemeral and idiosyncratic form of clothing and appearance enables disparate groups and individuals to communicate through what they wear, the book contributes, specifically, to a growing body of academic literature that is re-engaging with the criticality of costume and, broadly, to discussions about the communicative qualities of dress. In particular, it argues that forms of dress and performance that might appear socially peripheral can be deeply revealing about a society’s values and norms. Urging an academic reappraisal of fancy dress costume, Wild’s text is innovative for providing a definition of this sartorial term and an analytic framework for its study. This includes the adoption of a diachronic perspective, which is atypical for clothing-based research. Wild’s unique methodology is advantageous because it enables disparate examples to be examined concurrently. This facilitates the identification and investigation of cultural similarities and elicits more accurate judgements. To facilitate analytical comparison of fancy dress costume across diverse chronologies, geographies and cultures, the book is divided into four thematic chapters that each contain three case-studies. Investigation of these examples involves scrutiny of a wide variety of theories and primary source material, including interviews, journals, paintings, poetry, oral history, and surviving costumes. Many of the text-based sources used are not widely known because they are unavailable in English translation. Demonstrating the advantages of interdisciplinarity, Wild’s book therefore also provides strategies for conducting forensic research into other marginalised cultural forms.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -