The Fabric of Cultures

Book excerpt: Fashion is both public and private, material and symbolic, always caught within the lived experience and providing an incredible tool to study culture and history. The Fabric of Cultures examines the impact of fashion as a manufacturing industry and as a culture industry that shapes the identities of nations and cities in a cross-cultural perspective, within a global framework. The collected essays investigate local and global economies, cultures and identities and the book offers for the first time, a wide spectrum of case studies which focus on a diversity of geographical spaces and places, from global capitals of fashion such as New York, to countries less known or identifiable for fashion such as contemporary Greece and soviet Russia. Highly illustrated and including essays from all over the world, The Fabric of Cultures provides a comprehensive survey of the latest interdisciplinary scholarship on fashion, identity and globalisation.