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The afterword summarizes the high points of Mary Edwards Bryan’s life from the 1880 publication of Manch until her death at Clarkston, Georgia, in 1913. The authors assess the impact upon Mary of a series of suicides and natural deaths among close friends and relations and her subsequent determination to depart the South for New York. Detailing her prodigious writing and editing accomplishments and attendant celebrity in New York and Atlanta, the authors treat publisher George Munro (later George Munro's Sons) and his Fireside Companion and New York Monthly Fashion Bazar, John Seals and The Sunny South, and Joel Chandler Harris and Uncle Remus's Magazine. The authors note Mary's increasing lack of satisfaction with her own writing product, particularly underscoring the relative lack of success she enjoyed with her second novel Wild Work, which attempted objective treatment of the Coushatta Massacre. They also observe details of Bryan's personal and family life, the persistence of scandal in her social interactions, and the death of husband Iredell while evaluating the circumstances and importance of her effort to return to Florida for winters at the Indian River resort town, Coquina. Mary’s biography closes on details of her death and discussion of her professional legacies.

This chapter discusses William Klein’s filmmaking in relation to his photography, and how he has used documentary forms to investigate the relations between time and movement, image and montage. The chapter also looks at how Klein negotiates his identity as an American in Paris who has, nevertheless, remained artistically and politically attached to the USA, especially New York City. Some of Klein’s most iconic street photographs were taken in 1950s, in the streets of his childhood, and – as the chapter elucidates – much of his documentary filmmaking has involved expeditions into American culture in the second half of the twentieth century. In examining the various aesthetic and cultural issues provoked by Klein’s films, it also suggests a correspondence between his work and Roland Barthes’ intellectual project.

In this chapter, I explore the significance of increasingly stringent and exigent dieting, exercise, and surgery advice from the 1970s onward, highlighting how self-altering practices were cast as a means to become an acceptable member of society. It explores how the model became the ideal for the whole population. Simultaneously, however, the body’s vitality and mutability also came to be favored, as a biopolitics of beauty emerged, organizing and regulating publics at the level of population, as a standing reserve, always already in need of enhancement and optimization, ready for a close-up, in need of that makeover. In tandem with these developments, modeling work took on characteristics that prompted some of my respondents to refer to it as “the life,” a state of working that felt to many like having to be “on” all the time. In the transition from day job to total lifestyle, playing the role of being a model—sashaying about in crinolines, carrying a hatbox containing waist cinchers and war paints (the badge of the model’s trade), while ducking into movie theaters to make oneself scarce between calls—gave way to the casual street chic, “I only dress up on the runway” attitude of today, where models live the part, hiding the effort required to make looking glamourous seem easy and like something everyone should do.

Eileen Chang's fiction and essays show us an intricate relationship between the quotidian, gender and literary imagination. Similar to what Walter Benjamin calls “profane illumination,” her literary inspirations are drawn from the materialistic and anthropological dimensions in the mundane realm of everyday life. On the one hand, her feminine writings about clothing display Shanghai as a phantasmagoria in the perpetual process of innovation and destruction. On the other hand, her secular reflections can be traced to an ancient memory of Chinese antiquity without the celebration of a sense of youthfulness and freshness that characterizes Western modernist literature. Questioning the gendered space of everyday life, her writings, which deal with both the historical and the philosophical, destabilize the binary thinking of female sensibility and masculine sublimity.

The essay analyses fashion blogs as discursive and performative sites for the dissemination and production of fashion and provides a critical analysis of the processes of authorship, identity and persona construction from a feminist perspective. It also traces the recent cultural-historical developments, which have paved the way for the representation of identity and selfhood performed and displayed on fashion blogs. The author discusses continuities and dis-continuities in written and visual female authorship from the 1960s to the present.

The opening chapter of the book outlines a brief history of black fashion. Using Angela Davis as a guiding figure, the chapter discusses how and why soul style became a global phenomenon. Locating the style’s roots in the antebellum period, tracing its development in the interwar period, and showing its critical evolution in the years following WWII, the chapter makes a case for why clothing has always been tied to struggles for black freedom. The chapter centers this American history in a broader context of the African diaspora in the mid-twentieth century. It uses these intertwining movements as the cultural and political foundation from which soul style emerges as a global phenomenon. The chapter also offers important definitions of terms such as “style,” “fashion,” and “soul.”

In this chapter, I explore how the fashion show changed as television and the Internet, systems for gridding affectivity for profit, spread, by tracking these changes from Charles Frederick Worth’s innovative use of live mannequins to the “disdainful beauties” of the 1950s, to Mary Quant’s wild leap into the future when she recruited photographic models for the runway in the 1960s to, finally, the supermodels’ celebrity and the ensuing everydayness of fashion.

While the general public engages in varying levels of it, the models and modeling professionals I spoke to for this study claimed they felt as though they were never off duty and were always at work to produce the right “look” in person, in photographs, and online. Model agents made it clear that it matters where models live, where they eat and shop, and on which airline they travel. As this chapter explores, some respondents reported being told explicitly by their agents they had to put on the show all the time, even if they were just running around the corner to do an errand, mindful of the impression they might make as they are out and about, conscious of their online image created by the photos snapped of them in fashionable neighborhoods or at social events and posted to blogs or websites dedicated to documenting the modeling world. It seems like a lot of work, but models who really want to “make it” report trying to make it look fun to be exposed in this way, to be “on” all the time, to be out there in the spotlight, as often as humanly possible.

Chapter Two considers how Shanghai Tang, a Hong Kong-founded fashion brand, exploits Shanghai’s imagined cosmopolitan legacy towards the building of a multinational luxury brand. The author considers the rising political tensions between Hong Kong and Shanghai, as Hong Kong was handed over from British to mainland Chinese rule in 1997. The chapter discusses a 1997 Shanghai Tang advertisement featuring Chinese actress Gong Li, addressing how the image signals the return of class-based society, while sanitizing mainland China’s immediate socialist past. This chapter also examines the powerful influence of Shanghai Tang’s founder, art collector Sir David Tang, on the international dissemination of contemporary Chinese art, exploring key Shanghainese painters promoted by Tang, including Yu Youhan, Wang Ziwei and Ding Yi. Referencing these artists’ connections to Shanghai Tang, and also the French fashion brand, Christian Dior, the chapter theorizes the rise of a contemporary Chinese art/fashion system. The final section focuses on Shanghai-based sculptor Liu Jianhua, who has been supported by both Tang and Christian Dior, and the artist’s subversion of mainland China’s presumed role as “the factory of the world” through his ceramic-based practice.

The conclusion considers the continued, widespread proliferation of the staid East-meets-West trope through a critique of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 2015 exhibition, “China: Through the Looking Glass.” Ruminating on the afterlives of East-meets-West exoticizations, the conclusion synthesizes the preceding ones by analyzing the exhibition’s loaded cross-cultural hybrids of art-fashion-celebrity culture and Sino-US corporate sponsorship. The chapter argues that “China: Through the Looking Glass” might have countered the critique that the exhibition did not adequately present contemporary Chinese culture by including some of the art and design projects presented throughout the book, summarizing the vital issues these projects raise.

Kimora Lee Simmons’s career as a fashion model and media figure offers an alternative reading of Blasians as potentially resistive and subversive campy subjects. This chapter delves into how her use of camp is predicated on the performative nature of identity and her refusal to settle for the primacy of visibility and authenticity as key measures of race. Analyses of Simmons’s advertising campaigns, reality television show, and social media usage highlights the ways her Blasianness publicly challenges the idea of a color-blind, post-racial United States.

How might painting be understood in the 21^st century? Working from the supposition that the painter confronts an over-loaded pictorial regime each time she begins to paint, this chapter considers three forces relevant to the contemporary context: (1) cliché and terror, concepts developed by Jean Paulhan in his text, Le Fleur de Tarbes; (2) the painterly defined in contradistinction to digital; and (3) the fashionable in its capacity to baffle the viewer as to whether a work ruptures or leaves undisturbed the prevailing apparatus or dispositif. Recent paintings by Angela Brennan are used to discuss how the political aesthetic operates in works that have no direct political claim but are nonetheless disruptive of certain existing notions, particularly around judgement. It critically asks through the immanent tradition of Deleuze, Nietzsche and Spinoza, on what criteria and on whose authority does one form judgements. This section includes Brennan’s interest in Piero della Francesca. [151]

Chapter 3 compares and contrasts anxieties and concerns which surrounded the clothed and unclothed male body. Male bodies had a powerful cultural resonance after the war, in rehabilitative initiatives and emerging consumer industries. By the 1930s, the physical power of the masses, from the Bolshevik Revolution to images of crowds at play, was informing a national iconography of controlled and disciplined youth, very visible in newsreel footage from the 1930s of the Scouts, BB, boys' clubs, and totalitarian youth movements in Germany and Italy. At an individual level, young men's physical sense of self was coming under the growing influence of visual forms and commercial leisure trends, bringing working-class young men into contact with new models of personal behaviour and social interaction which made many sensitive to style, fashion and appearance. This chapter examines how working-class young men mediated the feminised connotations of consumption in negotiating these new physical images and ways of performing masculinity.

I describe in this chapter how the increased effort to harness hard-to-manage forms of “affective” energy accelerated the demand for models to sell brands and how eventually, in the form of the supermodels, models became brands themselves. The inauguration of the supermodels brought the transition from a girl who models to the 24/7 supermodel icon and the supermodels who became the quintessential glamour laborers who were never off duty. Facilitated by newly far flung webs of cable television and high-speed communications, the supermodels became household names. This transition laid the groundwork for the rise of mass fashion and the spread of glamour labor to the general populace. Prior to the regime of the blink, the fashion show, for instance, was nothing like the branded dazzle with which we are currently familiar.

In this chapter, I treat how changes in the goals and methods of the fashion shoot. The value of what the model did changed from the 1900s discovery that a person’s image could be owned by them and worth money to the carefully staged and scripted studio shots prevalent from the 1920s through the 1950s, to the far more intense and invasive practice of getting one’s “soul sucked out” by the camera lens, as one model described it, to being given the puzzling direction to try to look like a rat (as the former supermodel Cindy Crawford reported). This chapter tracks shifts in photographic modeling, from using models as mere props to an intense experience in which the model is expected to reveal herself utterly to the camera. Models’ stories about photographic sittings and shoots reveal how affective lability or mania became a valuable factor in modeling work for the camera in the age of the blink.

Chapter Three analyses the 2013 film Blue Jasmine as an example of a text in which the protagonist’s melancholia appears misplaced and is thus unable to be alleviated by a journey away from home. Jasmine operates as a social outcast who exemplifies value systems that are temporarily deemed morally reprehensible, based as they are upon the over-valuation of economic income and enthusiastic participation in consumer-capitalism. Blue Jasmine’s narrative and its protagonist must be understood as signifying at a temporary period of ideological weakening for neoliberalism and its associated political rhetoric. It is this moment of instability that allows for the privileged race and class status of the postfeminist representational subject within this film to be configured as an ethical problem to be debated, even if on superficial or temporary terms, rather than a conditional aspect of the aspirational ideal.

This chapter examines the athletic career of French tennis star, Suzanne Lenglen, who participated during the Golden Age of sports in the 1920s. Lenglen was one of the first female athletes to achieve worldwide recognition and acclaim for her tennis success, as well as her influence on the sport, including her fashion. Lenglen’s appeal extended beyond the tennis courts, and part of her lasting image rests on her ability to both challenge and reinforce ideas around femininity in sport during the 1920s.

This chapter maintains the focus on the 1960s, framing a discussion about similarities between the lifestyle habits and style of Playboy magazine and James Bond within the essential context of male consumerism and the rise of consumer culture, in that they both function effectively as consumer guides. The chapter sets out to identify and discuss some illustrative examples of this connection between Bond and Playboy in the decade and a half after they were created, especially in terms of consumer preferences, style and taste. There are obvious but important similarities in the ways that Playboy and the Bond novels and Sean Connery-era films operate as consumerist fantasies, identified with exclusive or expensive brand-named products, gadgetry, travel, fashion, food and drink, and defined by an attention to detail, as this chapter illustrates.