Fashion and Materialism

Ulrich Lehmann brings together methods and ideas from social sciences and material production to offer a new political reading of fashion in today’s post-democracy. Accessing rare source material across a wide range of European languages and cultures, he offers insight into new working structures in the manufacture of garments and textiles.

Reinvigorates materialism as a critical approach to analysing economics, society and media through the thematic focus on fashion as the economically and culturally dominant sector within post-industrial societies
Case studies include the male suit in Alfred Hitchcock’s film North by Northwest (1959), the revolutionary production methods in the work of Carol Christian Poell and the innovative textile manufacture of Bonotto in Molvena, north-east Italy
Redirects fashion theory toward materiality and materialism from previous art-historical and social-anthropological approaches
Exposes the need critically to engage with fashion production, away from the exclusive reading of fashion through its media representation
Extends the discussion of fashion production from aspects of labour conditions and sustainability to the materialist critique of the fashion system