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Shortlisted for the History Book Award in Scotland's National Book Awards, 2023 During the long 19th century, Scotland was home to an established body of skilled jewellers who were able to access a range of materials from the country's varied natural landscape: precious gold and silver; sparkling crystals and colourful stones; freshwater pearls, shells and parts of rare animals. Following these materials on their journey from hill and shore, across the jeweller's bench and on to the bodies of wearers, this book challenges the persistent notion that the forces of industrialisation led to the decline of craft. It instead reveals a vivid picture of skilled producers who were driving new and revived areas of hand skill, and who were key to fostering a focused cultural engagement with the natural world - among both producers and consumers - through the things they made. By placing producersand their skill in cultural context, it provides new and multifaceted insights into the wider transformations that marked British history during the long 19th century. Uniting an array of jewellery objects with a range of other sources - including paintings, newspaper reports, inventories of big houses and small workshops, works of literary geology and early travel writings - it sets out innovative methodologies for writing about the histories of craft production, the natural environment and the material world. Now available in a paperback edition, it will be an important addition to the bookshelf of cultural historians and those interested in Scotland's wild landscapes and natural objects.

Time, media, and visuality are watchwords of modernity across science, culture and the arts. At which point in history, though, did they decisively intersect? Identifying the year 1789 - or the beginning of the French Republic - as the radical moment at which science and the arts came together through radical innovation, this volume questions the reigning teleologies of modern art. Uniting two key areas of 19th-century European art - the French Revolution and 19th century technological and reproductive experimentation - this novel volume highlights the dual impact these developments had on the art of the period. In doing so, it opens up new and distinctive lines of inquiry around French visual culture, all the while mapping an expanded terrain of art objects, along with makers, consumers and situations of art. Considering a remarkably broad range of media and practices through an interdisciplinary lens, this diverse collection of essays brings together both eminent and emerging scholars in 18th and 19th century French visual culture and enriches our understanding of the period. The essays provide thought-provoking insights on the temporal dimension of art, challenging oversimplified views of artistic progress in modernity. They question teleological narratives, emphasizing the complexity of influences shaping the modern artist. As such, the book offers a new account of the story of French art's modernity by exploring the work of genre painters and miniaturists, sign-painters and animal artists, landscapists, architects, and restorers, as they worked out what it meant to be "post-revolutionary." As a result, the book promises appeal to academic audiences both within and beyond the discipline of art history.

This is the first book length study of Salon caricature, a widespread genre of press illustration that flourished in Paris in the second half of the 19th century. Salon caricature began with a few tentative lithographs in the 1840s and, within a few decades, no Parisian exhibition could open without appearing in warped, incisive, and hilarious miniature in the pages of the illustrated press. Supported by ample primary sources, from Baudelaire and Champfleury, to Grand-Carteret and Duret, as well as archival material made available here for the first time, Laugh Lines explores not only 19th-century caricature but a larger history of reproductive image technologies, including photography, and their relation to painting during the period of modernist emergence. In bringing to light this rich register of art criticism-in-pictures, Laugh Lines offers new material and methods for the study of 19th-century painting, modernism, and art historiography, notably repositioning Édouard Manet in relation to public laughter and comic press art. More generally, Langbein draws back the curtain on a robust culture of comedy around fine art and its reception in 19th-century France, one in which artists of every stripe, including the most sentimental or conservative, were ripe to be made hilarious.

This pioneering account of Modern Spiritualism in late 19th and early 20th-century Scotland is a compelling history of the international movement's cultural impact on Scottish art. From spirit-mediums creating séance art to mainstream artists of the Royal Scottish Academy, this exposition reveals for the first time the extent of Spiritualist interest in Scotland. With its interdisciplinary scope, Modern Spiritualism and Scottish Art combines cultural and art history to explore the ways in which Scottish art reflected Spiritualist beliefs at the turn of the 20th century. More than simply a history of the Spiritualist cause and its visual manifestations, this book also provides a detailed account of scepticism, psychical research, and occulture in modern Scotland, and the role that these aspects played in informing responses to Spiritualist ideology. Utilising extensive archival research, together with in-depth analyses of overlooked paintings, drawings and sculpture, Michelle Foot demonstrates the vital importance of Spiritualist art to the development of Spiritualism in Scotland during the 19th century. In doing so, the book highlights the contribution of Scottish visual artists alongside better-known Spiritualists such as Arthur Conan Doyle and Daniel Dunglas Home.

A dynamic resurgence in sewing and knitting is under way, with many people enjoying making and mending their own garments at home. However, stories abound of homemade clothes languishing at the back of the wardrobe. Amy Twigger Holroyd draws on ideas of fashion, culture and craft to explore makers' lived experiences of creating and wearing homemade clothes in a society dominated by shop-bought garments. Using the innovative metaphor of fashion as common land, Folk Fashion investigates the complex relationship between making, well-being and sustainability. Twigger Holroyd combines her own experience as a designer and knitter with first-hand accounts from folk fashion makers to explore this fascinating, yet under-examined, area of contemporary fashion culture.Looking to the future, she also considers how sewers and knitters might maximise the radical potential of their activities.

The new photo-illustrated magazines of the 1920s traded in images of an ideal modernity, promising motorised leisure, scientific progress, and social and sexual emancipation. Modernist Magazines and the Social Ideal is a pioneering history of these periodicals, focusing on two of the leading European titles: the German monthly UHU, and the French news weekly VU, taken as representative of the broad class of popular titles launched in the 1920s. The book is the first major study of UHU, and the first scholarly work on VU in English. Modernist Magazines explores, in particular, the striking use of regularity and repetition in photographs of modernity, reading these repetitious images as symbolic of modernist ideals of social order in the aftermath of the First World War. Introducing a novel methodology, pattern theory, the book argues for a critical return to the Gestalt tradition in visual studies. Alongside the UHU and VU case studies, Modernist Magazines offers an essential primer to interwar magazine culture in Europe. Accounts of rival titles are woven into the book's thematic chapters, which trace the evolution of the two magazines' photography and graphic design in the tumultuous years up to 1933.

Shortlisted for the Architects Sweden Critic's Award 2023Architecture and Retrenchment explores the 'neoliberal turn' in architecture, through the rise and fall of the Swedish welfare state.There are few better case studies of architecture's role in the retrenchment and dismantling of the welfare state than Sweden, the birthplace of the world-famous "Swedish Model" and now home to Europe's fastest-growing inequality. Through eight in-depth architectural case studies, Helena Mattsson analyzes how neoliberalism has created conditions for a new built environment which was once closely integral to the welfare system, examining how new architectural strategies and techniques were developed in order to protect the agency of architecture in a newly re-organised society, and revealing the role of architecture in creating new types of segregation, discrimination, and social stratification.With close feminist analysis running throughout - and drawing from oral histories, witness seminars, and participatory workshops - Architecture and Retrenchment provides an original interpretation of how architecture, space, aesthetics, and politics converged at the end of the twentieth century.

This is the first academic study of sneakers and the subculture that surrounds them. Since the 1980s, American sneaker enthusiasts, popularly known as "sneakerheads" or "sneakerholics", have created a distinctive identity for themselves, while sneaker manufacturers such as Reebok, Puma and Nike have become global fashion brands. How have sneakers come to gain this status and what makes them fashionable? In what ways are sneaker subcultures bound up with gender identity and why are sneakerholics mostly young men? Based on the author's own ethnographic fieldwork in New York, where sneaker subculture is said to have originated, this unique study traces the transformation of sneakers from sportswear to fashion symbol. Sneakers explores the obsessions and idiosyncrasies surrounding the sneaker phenomenon, from competitive subcultures to sneaker painting and artwork. It is a valuable contribution to the growing study of footwear in fashion studies and will appeal to students of fashion theory, gender studies, sociology, and popular culture.

In Urban and Visual Culture in Contemporary Iran, Pedram Dibazar argues that everyday life in Iran is a rich domain of social existence and cultural production. Regular patterns of day-to-day practice in Iran are imbued with forms of expressivity that are unmarked and inconspicuous, but have remarkable critical value for a cultural study of contemporary society. Blended into the rhythms of everyday life are nonconformist modes of presence, subtle in their visibility and non-confrontational in their resistance to the established societal norms and structures. This volume is about such everyday tactics and creativity as lived in space, visualised in cultural forms and communicated through media. Through its analysis of familiar everyday experiences, Urban and Visual Culture in Contemporary Iran covers a wide range of ordinary practices-such as walking, driving, shopping and doing or watching sports-and spatial conditions-such as streets, cars, rooftops, shopping centres and stadiums. It also explores a variety of cultural formations, including film, photography, architecture, literature, visual arts, television and digital media. This book offers new ways of thinking about visual and urban cultures by highlighting a politics of everyday life that is conditioned on concerns over visibility and presence.

By 2025, China will have built fifteen new 'supercities' each with 25 million inhabitants. It will have created 250 'Eco-cities' as well: clean, green, car-free, people-friendly, high-tech urban centres. From the edge of an impending eco-catastrophe, we are arguably witnessing history's greatest environmental turnaround - an urban experiment that may provide valuable lessons for cities worldwide. Whether or not we choose to believe the hype - there is little doubt that this is an experiment that needs unpicking, understanding, and learning from. Austin Williams, The Architectural Review's China correspondent, explores the progress and perils of China's vast eco-city program, describing the complexities which emerge in the race to balance the environment with industrialisation, quality with quantity, and the liberty of the individual with the authority of the Chinese state. Lifting the lid on the economic and social realities of the Chinese blueprint for eco-modernisation, Williams tells the story of China's rise, and reveals the pragmatic, political and economic motives that lurk behind the successes and failures of its eco-cities. Will these new kinds of urban developments be good, humane, healthy places? Can China find a 'third way' in which humanity, nature, economic growth and sustainability are reconciled? And what lessons can we learn for our own vision of the urban future? This is a timely and readable account which explores a range of themes - environmental, political, cultural and architectural - to show how the eco-city program sheds fascinating light on contemporary Chinese society, and provides a lens through which to view the politics of sustainability closer to home.

Mediated Messages presents a collection of original writing exploring the role played by the media in the development of postmodern architecture in the 1970s and 80s. The book's twelve chapters and case-studies examine a range of contemporary periodicals and exhibitions to explore their role in the postmodern. This focus on mediation as a key feature of architectural post-modernism, and the recognition that post-modernism grew out of developments in the media, opens up the possibility of an important new account of post-modernism distinct from existing narratives. Accompanied by a contextualizing introduction, the essays are arranged across four thematic sections (covering: images; international postmodernisms; high and low culture; and postmodern architects as theorists) and present a range of case-studies with a genuinely international scope. Altogether, this work makes a substantial contribution to the historical account of architectural postmodernism, and will be of great interest to researchers in postmodernism as well as those examining the role of the media in architectural history.

Newcomers to the fashion industry often base costings on the sum of a style's fabric, trims and labor-and to that they simply add their markup. However, every other activity of the business erodes that markup, and they find themselves with an unsustainable profit-or a loss. This guide will help you avoid these pitfalls to guarantee a sustainable profit. Apparel Costing details traditional and current costing methods for the fast-paced and e-commerce-focused fashion marketplace. You will learn industry-specific product/style costing that can be applied to garments produced both locally and globally. You'll also learn how to calculate line item percentages on indirect cost factors, such as factory sourcing, overhead, administration and product development. Key topics include: Target Market Pricing; Variable vs Fixed Costs; Direct vs Indirect Cost Factors; Cost-Based vs Value-Based Costing; Domestic vs International Production Costing; Effect of Sourcing on Costing; Sustainability in Costing; Fast Fashion vs. Slow Fashion

"Vive la Sociale": This rousing, revolutionary statement, written on a bright red banner across the top of James Ensor's Christ's Entry into Brussels in 1889, served as a visual manifesto and call to action by the Belgian artist (1860-1949), one that announced with an insistent, public voice the centrality of his art practice to the cultural discourse of modern Belgium. This provocative declaration serves as the title for this new study of Ensor's art focusing on its social discourse and the artist's interaction with and at times satirical encounter with his contemporary milieu. Rather than the alienated and traumatized Expressionist given preference in modern art history, Ensor is presented here as an artist of agency and purpose whose art practice engaged the issues and concerns of middle class Belgian life, society and politics and was informed by the values and class, race and gendered perspectives of his time. Ensor's radical vision and oppositional strategy of resistance, self-fashioning and performance remains relevant. This book with its timely, nuanced reading of the art and career of this often misunderstood "artist's artist", invites a re-evaluation not only of Ensor's social context and expressive critique but also his unique contribution to modernist art practice.

The nineteenth century in France witnessed the emergence of the structures of the modern art market that remain until this day. This book examines the relationship between the avant-garde Barbizon landscape painter, ThéodoreRousseau (1812-1867), and this market, exploring the constellation of patrons, art dealers, and critics who surrounded the artist.Simon Kelly argues for the pioneering role of Rousseau, his patrons, and his public in the origins of the modern art market, and, in so doing, shifts attention away from the more traditional focus on the novel careers of the Impressionists and their supporters. Drawing on extensive archival research, the book offers fresh insight into the role of the modern artist as professional. It provides a new understanding of the complex iconographical and formalchoices within Rousseau's oeuvre, rediscovering the original radical charge that once surrounded the artist's work and led to extensive and peculiarly modern tensions with the market place.

Storyville was the infamous red-light district of New Orleans. It was a world where normative social values didn't apply and was shrouded in mystery and myth until the photographs of E.J. Bellocq were rediscovered. Bellocq's depictions of Storyville's sex workers have typically been treated as tragic, ominous and emblematic of New Orleans' singularity. Yet, such interpretations have projected gendered stereotypes of frailty and victimhood onto the women they portrayed. In Images of Sex Work, Mollie LeVeque interrogates these glib readings and argues that sex work was a routine aspect of life in a modern city. She supports this theory by examining a range of cultural forms such as crime fiction, illustrations and paintings from contemporary urban centres like Paris, London and New York. In doing so, she advances the new argument that Bellocq humanised his subjects, de-sensationalised sex work and gave these women the dignity they were all too often denied.

In the early sixties, crowds gathered to watch rites of destruction - from the demolition derby where makeshift cars crashed into each other for sport, to concerts where musicians destroyed their instruments, to performances of self-destructing machines staged by contemporary artists. Destruction, in both its playful and fearsome aspects, was ubiquitous in the new Atomic Age. This complicated subjectivity was not just a way for people to find catharsis amid the fears of annihilation and postwar trauma, but also a complex instantiation of ideological crisis in a time with some seriously conflicted political myths. Destruction Rites explores the ephemeral visual culture of destruction in the postwar era and its links to contemporary art. It examines the demolition derby; games and toys based on warfare; playgrounds situated in bomb sites; and the rise of garage sales, where goods designed for obsolescence and destined for the garbage heap are reclaimed and repurposed by local communities.Mona Hadler looks at artists such as Jean Tinguely, Niki de Saint Phalle, Martha Rosler and Vito Acconci to expose how the 1960s saw destruction, construction and the everyday collide as never before. During the Atomic age, whether in the public sphere or art museums, destruction could be transformed into a constructive force and art objects and performances often oscillated between the two.

Italian architecture has long exerted a special influence on the evolution of architectural ideas elsewhere - from the Beaux-Arts academy's veneration of Rome, to modernist and postmodern interest in Renaissance proportion, Baroque space, and Mannerist ambiguity. This book critically examines this enduring phenomenon, exploring the privileged position of Italian architects, architecture, and cities in the architectural culture of the past century.Questioning the deep-rooted myth of Italy within architectural history, the book presents case studies of Italy's powerful yet problematic position in 20th-century architectural ideologies, at a time when established Eurocentric narratives are rightly being challenged. It reconciles the privileged position of Italian architecture and design with the imperative to write history across a more global, diverse, heterogenous cultural geography. Twenty chapters from distinguished international scholars cover subjects and architects ranging from Alberti to Gio Ponti, Aldo Rossi, Manfredo Tafuri, Vittorio Gregotti; cities from Rome and Venice to Milan; and an array of international architects, movements, and architectural ideas influenced by Italy. The chapters each question where, how, and why the disciplinary edifice of 20th-century architecture-its canon of built, visual, textual, and conceptual works-relied on Italian foundations, examining where and how those foundations have become insecure.Indispensable for students and scholars of both Italian and global architectural history, Italian Imprints on Twentieth-Century Architecture provides an opportunity to consider the architectural and urban landscape of Italy from substantially new points of view.

Fashion in Altermodern China examines key features of women's fashion within the cultural and political context of contemporary China. While global brands and styles heavily influence Chinese consumer trends, the Chinese fashion 'system' is formed of its own internal logics and emergent trends, too. Adopting the theoretical term 'altermodern', Feng Jie encourages us to view China in terms of its rapid modernization which presents its own rhythms and meanings, and argues persuasively that Chinese fashion can't be wholly understood in terms of a Western discourse of modernity, postmodernity and the global.Expanding our understanding of the fashion 'system', Fashion in Altermodern China takes on board new trends in global trade, new technologies, and the hybridity of designs and consumption of fashion. Through critical readings of Barthes, on the 'neutral', and Jullien, on 'blandness', both directly influenced by Asian philosophies, the author offers a new perspective on Chinese fashion, arguing that, while global-local contexts lead to identifiably postmodern and hybrid aesthetics, for women in contemporary China the flux and mix of available fashions is experienced in a more open neutral manner than scholars have previously described. Crucially, then, rather than position trends in China only in terms of 'hybridity' (which betrays a Western bias and a binary logic of host-recipient), there are more fluid ways in which we need to understand how women engage in fashion in China today.

Through its examination of five quite different art events in cities across Europe, Contemporary Art Biennials in Europe offers a compelling exploration of how public art takes place in the modern city. Roughly tracing a central horizontal trajectory from the western to the eastern edges of the continent, Nicolas Whybrow considers the Folkestone Triennial in the UK, Sculpture Projects Münster in Germany, the Venice Biennale in Italy, Belgrade's Mikser Festival in Serbia and the Istanbul Biennial in Turkey.Writing within the context of a thirty-year international 'biennial boom', Whybrow interrogates the extent to which biennial events and their artworks seek to engage with the socio-cultural and political complexity of cities, in particular the work that is involved in this relationship. With its focus on Europe, he also tells a composite story of continental difference at a moment of high tension, centering on issues of migration, political populism and uncertainty around the future form of the European Union.

Fashion is all around us, and so too is fashion journalism. Discussions of fashion proliferate in an ever-increasing range of media, from newspapers and magazines to tweets and TV programs. Fashion Journalism: History, Theory and Practice is an accessible, comprehensive guide to writing about fashion in any form, whether in style blogging, magazine interviews, news reportage or art reviews.Exploring what sets fashion journalism apart from other forms of journalistic writing, the book features a wide range of global fashion case studies, from Carmel Snow's reporting on Dior's 'New Look' to 1970s responses to Yves Saint Laurent, and Diana Vreeland's role as a fashion editor. Through a series of engaging exercises, you will learn how to find inspiration, carry out successful research, structure your work logically, use a style appropriate to your readership, and to make the leap from descriptive writing to informed analysis and criticism. Engaging and clearly written, Fashion Journalism examines how recent technological developments are shaping and driving fashion journalism, and delves into the theory and practice of writing about fashion.

In The City as Subject, Carolyn S. Loeb examines distinctive bodies of public art in Berlin: legal and illegal murals painted in West Berlin in the 1970s and 1980s, post-reunification public sculptures, and images and sites from the street art scene. Her careful analyses show how these developed new architectural and spatial vocabularies that drew on the city's infrastructure and daily urban experience. These works challenged mainstream urban development practices and engaged with citizen activism and with a wider civic discourse about what a city can be. Loeb extends this urban focus to her examination of the extensive outdoor installation of the Berlin Wall Memorial and its mandate to represent the history of the city's division. She studies its surrounding neighborhoods to show that, while the Memorial adopts many of the urban-oriented vocabularies established by the earlier works of public art she examines, it truncates the story of urban division, which stretches beyond the Wall's existence. Loeb suggests that, by embracing more multi-vocal perspectives, the Memorial could encourage the kind of participatory and heterogeneous construction of the city championed by the earlier works of public art.

At a time of unprecedented levels of change in the production of building materials and their deployment in construction, better theoretical and historical tools are needed to understand these new developments and how they are altering the practices and concepts of architecture. Building Materials offers a radical rethink of how materials, as they are constituted in architectural practice, are themselves constructed and, in turn, uncovers a vast and neglected resource of architectural writing about materials as they are mobilized in architecture.The book is unique in conceiving architectural specification as a starting point for architectural theory, arguing that how materials are prescribed - through a range of practices from the literal processes of procurement and manufacture to epistemological, contractual, social and economic frameworks - radically alters their potential in architecture. Drawing on the work of French philosopher Gilbert Simondon, as well as close readings of everyday specifications from the 18th to 21st centuries, the book reveals that materials do not pre-exist their shaping or use in the world, but come into being through the processes that constitute them.The book addresses three distinct methods of specification each through the lens of a different material - 'naming' through timber, 'process-based' through concrete, and 'performance specification' through glass - in turn revealing how the process of architectural specification (or 'Preliminary Operations' as Simondon puts it) allows for the development of specific relationships between material and function.

During the interwar years, a proliferation of violence encroached upon the glossy, idealistic world of fashion: from the curiously common appearance of dismembered heads in fashion illustration, to seemingly torturous techniques and devices advertised by beauty imagery, even extending to garments designed to look assaulted and destroyed. Danger in the Path of Chic brings this disturbing imagery to light for the first time, proposing new directions for historians of fashion, violence and culture in the interwar years.Concentrating on London, Paris and New York as fashion centres and political allies, the volume explores why horror manifested itself in this way, at this time, and in a sphere that is usually perceived as being built on fantasy and escape. In doing so, Danger in the Path of Chic situates fashion within the very real social, psychological, economic and political traumas of the period.

In the first comprehensive study of the interactions between fashion, performance and performativity, a group of international experts explore fashion as the ideal 'complex space' - or, in other words, the ideal space where performance and performativity come together, according to the works of seminal theorists Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Andrew Parker.Bringing together western and non-western, historical and contemporary case studies and theories, the book explores the magazines, photography, exhibitions, global colonial divides, digital media, and more, which have become key markers of the fashion industry as we know it today.Using existing literature as a springboard and incorporating perspectives from fashion studies, art history, media studies and gender studies, as well as from artists and practitioners, Fashion, Performance, and Performativity is an innovative and essential work for students, scholars and practitioners across multiple disciplines.

This book celebrates and seeks to understand the overlooked appearances of hybrid forms in visual culture; artefacts and practices that meld or interweave incongruous elements in innovative ways. And with an emphasis on the material aspects of such entities, the book adopts the term 'mixed form' for them.Focusing on key phenomena in the last half millennium such as the cabinet of curiosities, the broadside ballad and the chapbook as early forms of image-text, the scrapbook, assemblage, and, in digital times, so-called 'mixed reality,' the book argues that while the quality of inconsistency is traditionally dismissed, its expression nevertheless plays a vital role in social life.Crucially, Mixed Forms of Visual Culture relates its phenomena to the emergence of the division of labour under capitalism and addresses the shifting relationships between art and life, when singularity and uniformity are variously valued and dismissed in the two arenas, and at different points in history.Two of the book's chapters take the form of visual essays, with one comprising an anthology of found scrapbook pages and the other offering an analysis of artists' scrapbooks. The book is richly illustrated throughout.