Cool shades: the history and meaning of sunglasses
- Submitting institution
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Nottingham Trent University
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 13 - 697335
- Type
- A - Authored book
- DOI
-
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- Publisher
- Bloomsbury Academic
- ISBN
- 9780857854445
- Open access status
- Out of scope for open access requirements
- Month of publication
- December
- Year of publication
- 2014
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- 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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C - Fashion and Textiles Research Centre
- Proposed double-weighted
- Yes
- Double-weighted statement
- The output is a monograph that grew out of a body of research that spanned 15 years. It investigates cool in parallel with sunglasses drawing from a range of archival and textual sources. The work is distinctive in its scope, and its weaving of multiple threads of analysis, only possible with painstaking and broad research over an extended period. Its analysis includes examples from a variety of historical periods and cultural genres, approached through a variety of theoretical lenses appropriate to modes of vision, interaction and subjectivity in the contexts explored.
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- This is the first book to bring sustained academic attention to sunglasses both as a fashion accessory and as a ubiquitous signifier of ‘cool’ in contemporary culture taking a multi-disciplinary approach drawing on visual, material and historical perspectives and methods.
Sunglasses are used to make an innovative interrogation of the definition and appeal of ’coolness’. Cool is considered in relation to modernity and identity, exploring relevant contexts like the beach, the city, the nightclub, the WW1 fighter plane. The book advances existing scholarship, demonstrating that seemingly diverse and contradictory concepts of cool do connect as responses to threats to self, brought about by the challenges of modernity.
Cool Shades was developed through the peer review of four conference presentations within Leisure Studies, Visual Culture, Material Culture and Design History. Since its publication, Brown was commissioned by Valerie Steele (current editor of Fashion Theory) to write the scholarly article for ‘Sunglasses’ in Bloomsbury’s Online Fashion Archive and invited to speak in Milan at the opening event of the international optical trade fair ‘Mido’’s 2015 . There book also led to numerous requests for interview (the Guardian, The Telegraph, as well as numerous global newspapers and radio programmes) and was featured on the BBC (online and on BBC1 TV), multiple news/culture blogs and websites as well as being the focus of Laurie Taylor’s 2019 edition of ‘Thinking Allowed’ on Cool in October 2019 on BBC Radio 4.The review in Journal of Design History confirms it is ‘an original contribution’ which ‘advances scholarship on the cultural history of eyewear’ and ‘open[s] up the field for further… scholarship’ suggesting it is enlightening for design, film/cultural studies, sociology, and others concerned with image, identity, glamour, celebrity, fashion trends and ‘cool’.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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