Design

The enduring influence of Saint Laurent’s designs in modern fashion is undeniable. Concepts introduced by Saint Laurent, like the tuxedo jacket for women and the sheer blouse and dress, have become staples in contemporary fashion, transcending their origins to become symbols of power, elegance and sexuality. His ability to anticipate and articulate the needs and desires of the modern woman has left a lasting blueprint for how fashion interacts with social change and individual identity. Moreover, even after his death at 71 in 2008, Saint Laurent’s integration of art and fashion continues to inspire current designers, seen in the ongoing collaborations between high fashion and contemporary artists.
Saint Laurent was above all an artist of synthesis, of agglomeration and reshaping, of conglomeration and adaptation. His work is a fusion of the tactile and aesthetic with fancy and supposition – for his interiors are not what were but could have been, a projection of imagination and personality. It is a straddling of two separate worlds, which is crucial to fashion. His significance is in making this explicit.

In a little over twenty years, New York–-based fashion designer Thome Browne has decisively and permanently changed the fashion industry. Through his clothes that are rooted in America’s distinctive preppie style, he has challenged age-old conventions of tailoring by altering proportions and blurring gender boundaries. The cropped trouser, which has become a staple of people’s wardrobes around the world, owes much to Browne’s pioneering reinterpretation of the suit. Through highly choreographed catwalk shows, he has enlivened the presentation of fashion, creating soulful spectacles that variously critique and cherish common themes in human lives.
Browne’s influence within the fashion industry has been recognised through various awards. The Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) has named him ‘Menswear Designer of the Year’ on three occasions, in 2006, 2013, and 2016. Since 2023, Browne has served as the CFDA’s Chair. In May 2023, Browne dressed nine celebrities to honour Karl Lagerfeld at the annual gala hosted by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
This book considers Browne’s position as a fashion auteur by focusing on four collections that enable detailed consideration of his innovative clothing designs and catwalk presentations, situating them within their historical and social context and drawing out what makes them distinctive and influential.

Today as in times past, the figure of the dandy evokes the image of a fashionable male who achieves social influence by distinctive elegance in dress and sophisticated self-presentation. The book explores the history of Dandy as a cultural type across Europe and Russia from the eighteenth century through the present day, analysing different manifestations of dandyism from sparse minimalism to opulent richness. Olga Vainshtein offers a unique view on dandyism as a cultural tradition, based not merely on fashionable attire, but also as a particular lifestyle with specific standards of behaviour, bodily practices and conceptual approaches to dress. The dandy is described as the prototypical hero of the modern cult of celebrities. From clubbing manners, the techniques of virtual aristocratism, urban flâneurs and the correct way to examine people, Vainshtein walks us through the optical duels and the techniques of visual assessment at social gatherings. Readers will learn about strategies of subversive behaviour found in practical jokes, the fine art of noble scandal, dry wit, bare-faced impudence and mocking politeness. Vainshtein outlines the principles of dandyism through an examination of strategies of self-fashioning among famous dandies such as George Brummell, Count D’Orsay, Oscar Wilde and Robert de Montesquiou. Looking at dandyism as a nineteenth-century literary movement, Vainshtein examines representation of dandies in fiction. Along the way, the author offers the English-language reader something entirely new: a history of Russian and Soviet dandyism. Finally, a large section is devoted to the dandies of today, including the discussion of African sapeurs.

Emerging Thoughts in Disability and Humanness examines the role of embodied disablement in providing an important but often circumvented analysis of the explicit and implicit nature of the legitimate human body, its symbolism, and responses that such bodies elicit from diverse local through global social and cultural entities. The various sections of the book introduce the theoretical and historical foundations for analyzing humanness, and the role of the atypical body in determining membership, meaning and worth; examine embodied criteria of “humanness” and offending corporeal characteristics; describe and analyze how offenders are identified and depicted in diverse contexts; delve into how these bodies are met with praxis and axiological responses from revision through exclusion; and invoke contemporary post-postmodernist marriages of varied disciplines as frameworks for returning creative substance into rethinking disability within the textured fabric of humanness.

The field of poster studies is vast, but it is surprising how little work has been done till date on the fundamental structures – semiotic and semantic – that underpin the visual messages posters produce. Most studies of posters focus either on their history; on specific themes – politics, travel, sport, cinema; or on their status as collectable items. Though such approaches are valid, they hardly account for the specificity of the poster’s appeal or for the complex semiotic and cultural issues poster art raises. This book sets out to tackle these latter issues since they are fundamental both to the deeper significance and to the wider appeal of the poster as a cultural form. 

In doing so it focuses on the field of airline travel posters which developed precisely in the period of the twentieth century (1920–1970) that coincided with the onset of mass travel. The romance and excitement of fast travel to exotic destinations stimulated some memorable poster images that today have lost none of their magic. Since posters are cultural signs, to understand better how they work and the value attached to them even after their commercial or political message has been communicated, it is useful to analyse them in terms of both their sociocultural histories and their semiological structures. What this book sets out to do is to combine these approaches in such a way as to enhance the viewer/reader’s understanding of both the cultural and the semiological aspects of the poster and to show how the interaction of these aspects produces the specific quality of its messages.

Although posters are essentially word/image constructs, little attention has been paid to this fundamental aspect of their semiological structures. While Roland Barthes (1964) and other structuralist semioticians of the 1960s and 1970s –in France in particular – have made inroads into what is at stake in the poster’s word/ image structure, this book pursues the implications of this for the rhetoric of persuasion that is activated by the poster in fulfilling its dual function as provider of information and agent of seduction. For the poster, from the start of the twentieth century, has established a conventional repertory of textual/visual motifs that it has applied across a wide range of communicative functions – political, commercial and artistic. The aim of this book is to analyse the way these motifs are structured since they reveal much about the way cultural messages are produced and the way the poster is able to promote both a specific, product-centred message and aesthetic pleasure through a multiplicity of connotations.