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This book tells the story of critical avant-garde design in Japan. It challenge the characterisation of Japanese design as beautiful, sublime or a simple product of 'Japanese culture', and reveal the ways in which material and visual culture can serve to voice protest and formulate social critique. -- .

Crafting design in Italy is the first book to examine the role that craft played in post-war Italian design, one of the most celebrated design episodes in the twentieth century. Craft was vital to the development of Italian design, and it has been so far overlooked.This book examines the multiple ways craft shaped Italian design from 1945 to the 1980s in the context of bigger socio-economic, cultural and political change; from post-war reconstruction to the economic 'miracle' of the 1960s, to the rise of the countercultural Radical Design movement and advent of postmodernism. It consists of case studies on design areas including product, furniture, fashion, glass and ceramics to bring to light previously unknown makers and objects as well as re-examine design 'icons' such as Gio Ponti's Superleggera chair and Ettore Sottsass's Memphisware. It also offers a model for analysing design and craft's relationship in other contexts, including today.

Drawing on research and models from anthropology, material culture and art history, this study explores topics as diverse as Inka stonework, cork platforms for shoes and the Christian Eucharist. -- .

This innovative volume explores how individuals understood production processes in new ways during the eighteenth century. It examines a series of different groups - consumers, retailers, designers, manufacturers and workers - to show how their means of perceiving production changed in this period. In doing so, it reorients current discussions of consumption and production to see them as interrelated entities. At the same time, it underscores the importance of materiality to understandings of eighteenth-century consumer culture. As such, it moves beyond taste, desire and novelty to reveal how objects acted as conduits through which people living in Georgian Britain could examine the material world and the processes and knowledge that rendered it. Primarily bought in retail spaces, ceramic objects were more than fashionable commodities, they were also pieces of clay that had been shaped, fired and decorated. How then did contemporaries conceive of such materiality? Combining material culture and visual culture approaches, this volume shows how consumers made use of different representations of production to understand manufacturing and making. By also exploring how retailers, designers, manufacturers and workers conceived of production processes, the contested nature of such understandings begin to emerge. In marking out the sites upon which these groups disputed ideas about production, this study makes an important contribution to assessing how people in eighteenth-century Britain explored the labour, materials, knowledge and skills that constituted the material world around them.

Drawing on research and models from anthropology, material culture and art history, this study explores topics as diverse as Inka stonework, cork platforms for shoes and the Christian Eucharist. -- .

This illustrated survey of 600 years of fashion investigates its cultural and social meanings from medieval Europe to 20th-century America. It provides a guide to the changes in style and taste, showing that clothes have always played a pivotal role in defining a sense of identity and society.

This fascinating collection provides a chronologically arranged set of case studies looking at how interior design has constantly redefined itself as a manifestation of culture, from the eighteenth century to the present day.

First full-length study on the 1951 Festival of Britain. An examination of how Britain and Britishness were portrayed in the 1951's Festival's exhibitions and events. Covers the Festival's history and historiography, purpose, representations of the future and past, the role of London and the 'local', the British Empire and finally its legacy. -- .

Focussing on the consumer demand for goods in Renaissance Italy, The Material Renaissance establishes the dynamic social character of exchange. It demonstrates that the cost of goods, including the price of the most basic items, was largely contingent upon on the relationship between buyer and seller. -- .