Fashion and Motherhood: Image, Material, Identity: Laura Snelgrove: Bloomsbury Visual Arts

Fashion and Motherhood

Image, Material, Identity

Fashion and Motherhood

Image, Material, Identity

Description

Motherhood, whether achieved through biological or other means, is not a rare experience; dressing oneself, even less so. The two phenomena are intimately linked, as both occur on and to the private body, and are also fully subject to social pressures and the changing tides of public opinion. They also, for anyone who experiences motherhood, define one another and work together to shape an individual's identity and place in their culture.

This rich collection explores the essential question of how motherhood and fashion interact, interrogating their relationships to power, misogyny, temporality, longing and embodiment, among other themes. The 13 essays examine representations on film, in popular print and literature; they use images, narrative and material evidence from the past to excavate the historical cleavages in how mothers have been expected to hide, display, share and sacrifice their bodies. An international range of scholars explores the 19th to the 21st centuries, tracing how fashion and motherhood have operated as powerfully interdependent experiences and continue to determine how women are judged and corralled, yet also find meaning, connection and strength.

List of Illustrations
Preface
Foreword
Acknowledgments
Fashion and Motherhood: Introduction

Part I: Image
Introduction
Mediated Role Models
Introduction
1. Dress to Repress: Fashioning Motherhood in Semi-Authoritarian Hong Kong
Pui-sze Leung and Kin-long Tong
2. Beyoncé: Mistress of Slaying Oshun
Darnell-Jamal Lisby
3. The Hidden Life of Kylie: Fashioning a Private (and Privatized) Celebrity Pregnancy
Maureen Lehto Brewster
Fictional Mothers Onscreen
Introduction
4. The Fashionable Mother as Dangerous Contradiction in Telugu Film
Indira Jalli
5. Fashion and Motherhood at War: A Costume Analysis of The Zookeeper's Wife
Morolake Dairo
6. The Fascinance of the Maternal Gaze: Kate and Laura Mulleavy's Woodshock
Kimberly Lamm

Part II: Material
Introduction
7. “The Corset Crusade”: Dress Reformers and the Maternity Corset
Karen Case
8. Design for Borderline Bodies
Lauren Downing Peters
9. Mother's Milk Is Best of All: Breastfeeding Garments from 1880 to 1930
Claire Salmon
10. Rei Kawakubo and the Bound Pregnant Body
Katrina Orsini

Part III: Identity
Introduction
11. “Mommy Fashion is Still Fashion”: U.S. Style Guides for Pregnant Women and Mothers in the Twenty-First Century
Holly Kent
12. Out of Time: Constant Change, Maternity Dressing, and Pregnancy in Lockdown
Sarah Garland
13. “Ole Rag 'n' Lumber”: Intergenerational, Gendered, and Classed Relationships with Clothing, from Rag 'n' Bone to Depop
Liza Betts

Appendix: Sexy Mamas: Liz Lange and the Golden Age of Designing for Pregnancy
Pamela Roskin

List of Contributors
Index

Product details

Published	Feb 22 2024
Format	Hardback
Edition	1st
Extent	264
ISBN	9781350276697
Imprint	Bloomsbury Visual Arts
Illustrations	25 bw illus
Dimensions	9 x 6 inches
Publisher	Bloomsbury Publishing

A fabulous collection of essays offering up new perspectives and debates, whether that be depictions of good and bad mothers; attitudes to fatness or 'stoutness'; or contemporary reflections on intergenerational dress and mothering.

Jacki Willson, University of Leeds, UK
This book is a joy – and long overdue. In addressing motherhood, the authors bring insightful and serious attention to a subject and a condition that has been overlooked in fashion studies … For those of us who are mothers – and for those who are not – this book validates the significance of this most liminal and most essential human experience for our greater understanding of bodies, identities, culture, fashion, and dress.

Hazel Clark, Parsons School of Design, The New School, New York, USA
A very timely collection of on the neglected experience of motherhood as experienced and represented through fashion in many arenas – film, TV and celebrity, and popular music – combining personal reflections with provocative insights on the many constructions of motherhood through fashion … Fascinating reading.

Joanne Entwistle, Kings College London, UK