Styling Shanghai

by Christopher Breward (Editor)

Styling Shanghai is the first book dedicated to exploring the city's fashion cultures, examining its growing status as one of the world's foremost fashion cities. From its origins as an international treaty port in the 19th century, Shanghai has emerged as a global leader in the production, mediation and consumption of fashion. This book reveals how the material and imaginative context of this thriving urban centre has produced vivid interpretations of fashion as object, image and idea.

Bringing together contributions by a range of leading international fashion historians and theorists, and drawing on extensive original research, Styling Shanghai offers an interdisciplinary analysis of the mega-city's shifting position as a fashion capital. Rooted in collaboration between leading UK, Australian and Shanghai-based institutions, it considers the impact of local and global textile manufacturing, the representation and marketing of 'Shanghai Style', bodies and gender in the 'Paris of the East', and the challenges of globalization, commercialization and digital communication in contemporary Shanghai.

344 pages, Hardcover

Published January 23, 2020

About the author

Christopher Breward is Director of Collection and Research at the National Galleries of Scotland, UK and Professorial Fellow at Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh, UK.

Reviews

[Maurits · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not every chapter is equally as interesting, but non the less is this book a very unique look on a niche subject within China studies and Fashion studies. My favourite chapter was the last one just because it was written more like an editorial rather than a paper, but still the book as a whole is readable and very interesting.

[JoIin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some chapters were brilliant in analysis, focus and conclusion (among them, Djurdja Bartlett's part). Some were.. less so (I particularly disliked the one about Mao-era fashion). Overall fun read