From dressing up to dressing down, this book exposes the complex ways that fashions and costumes render the body presentable in a range of social situations. It investigates the varied ways in which western and non-western clothes operate to give the body meaning. It is useful for those interested in style, costume, the body, gender or history.

Bringing together original, cutting-edge contributions from leading international scholars across a range of disciplines, this book is essential reading for anyone interested in exploring the intersections and changing relationship between fashion and art, past and present.

Sport and dance command the devotion of countless athletes, dancers and fans worldwide. This volume argues that these two embodied cultural forms share a vital capacity to constitute and express identities through their practiced movements and scripted forms.

Quietly but implacably, powerful transnational corporations are gaining power over our visual world. This book exposes the interior workings of the visual content industry, which produces approximately 70 per cent of the images that define consumer cultures. It provides an exploration of industrialized commercial photography, its uses and abuses.

Bad architecture. Soulless. Destructive of communities. The suburbs are much-maligned places. We see this time and again in films like American Beauty and novels like The Ice Storm . This comparative study of England and the United States, offers fresh interpretations on suburbia.

A social history of protest movements in 1960s Germany departs from the limited and often politically biased reports of participants by placing the protests within the wider contexts of social change and international events. The author shows how the protest movements reflected and influenced social and political change in post-war Germany.

Examines the relationship between gender and ethnicity in Europe, viewed from within an immigration framework. This book makes the links between gender and ethnicity, thus giving ethnic minority women greater visibility within the European context. It considers the relationship between gender and ethnicity from a number of thematic perspectives.

A comprehensive and definitive account of one of the many communities of South Asians to emerge throughout the Western industrial world since the Second World War - the British Pakistanis in Manchester. This book examines the cultural dimensions of immigrant entrepreneurship and the formation of an ethnic enclave community.

Over the past three centuries, London has established itself as one of the world's most inventive fashion capitals. 'Fashioning London' looks at the manner in which particular styles of dress became associated with this leading international city.

Yuniya Kawamura provides a concise and much-needed introduction to the sociology of fashion. She argues that clothing is a tangible material product whereas fashion is a symbolic cultural product. She also debunks the myth of 'the genius designer' explaining that fashion is not about clothes but is a belief.

Provides a definition of 'fashion' as the cultural construction of the embodied identity. This work provides an international and interdisciplinary forum for the analysis of cultural phenomena ranging from foot binding to fashion advertising.

Exploring the nature of Nazi family ideology, this book provides an overview of various aspects of Nazi family policy, including the impact of eugenics upon population policy and issues such as marriage, divorce, contraception, abortion and welfare measures.

The increase in the levels of divorce and separation is having an impact on the conduct and nature of family relationships. This book offers an investigation of these critical transformations through an ethnographic analysis of post-divorce family life in Britain.

A comprehensive study of Italian anarchism from the beginning of the century to the rise of fascism. The text reconstructs the development of anarchist and syndicalist ideas and programmes and charts their relations with Gramsci and the Turin-based Ordine Nuovo group.

Taking as its focus memorials of the World War I in Britain, this book studies public symbols by exploring how different motives for commemorating the dead were reconciled through the processes of local politics to create a widely valued form of collective expression.