Dressing Global Bodies addresses the complex politics of dress and fashion from a global perspective spanning four centuries, tying the early global to more contemporary times, to reveal clothing practice as a key cultural phenomenon and mechanism of defining one's identity.
This collection of essays explores how garments reflect the hierarchies of value, collective and personal inclinations, religious norms and conversions. Apparel is now recognized for its seminal role in global, colonial and post-colonial engagements and for its role in personal and collective expression. Patterns of exchange and commerce are discussed by contributing authors to analyse powerful and diverse colonial and postcolonial practices. This volume rejects assumptions surrounding a purportedly all-powerful Western metropolitan fashion system and instead aims to emphasize how diverse populations seized agency through the fashioning of dress.
Dressing Global Bodies contributes to a growing scholarship considering gender and race, place and politics through the close critical analysis of dress and fashion; it is an indispensable volume for students of history and especially those interested in fashion, textiles, material culture and the body across a wide time frame.
About the Author: Beverly Lemire is Henry Marshall Tory Chair, Department of History and Classics, University of Alberta, Canada. She publishes widely on early modern consumer practice, fashion, material culture, textiles and trade, most recently Global Trade and the Transformation of Consumer Cultures: The Material World Remade, c. 1500-1820 (2018).
Giorgio Riello is Chair of Early Modern Global History at the European University Institute, Italy. Among his books are Cotton (2013), Luxury (2016) and Back in Fashion (2020). Giorgio has published extensively on fashion, textiles and global trade between Europe and Asia in the early modern period.
