…isms: Understanding Fashion is a guide to Western fashion practices over the past several centuries by Mairi Mackenzie, a specialist in Cultural and Historical Studies at The London College of Fashion. The book envisions fashion through the iconic figures and sociopolitical circumstances that influenced the trends and anti-trends in costume over the years.

Organizationally, it is structured like a travel guide or a text-book. A “How to use this book” section introduces the hokey, yet useful icons in each section to delineate material such as “Introduction,” “Key Words”, “See Also” (related practices), and “Don’t see” (contrary practices). A preference for flowing text led me to regularly skip to the “Main Definition” of every ism. Despite its engagement with the format of a User’s Manual, the main content flows with an engaging readability that is impressive for a reference book.

Mackenzie skillfully distills the several hundred years of fashion into concise descriptions of specific aesthetics and influences. The book is arranged by century starting with the 17th and 18th Centuries. The evolution and decline of Baroque and Rococo fashions are examined as the direct result of a changing socioeconomic climate in 17th Century France. While clothing was once a statement of privilege, the egalitarianism of the French Revolution led to the decline of fanciful fashion by the end of the 18th Century.

In the 19th Century, the technological advancements of the Industrial Revolution enabled a burgeoning middle class that imposed stricter social etiquettes. Mackenzie explores the ways in which codes of class and gender were presented in fashion, focusing in particular upon how women’s clothing became more physically restrictive as a direct reflection of women’s constricted place in society.

The world of fashion diversified in the 20th century as media and industry proliferated. Between looser social codes and the emergence of textile mass production came a fashion that was aesthetically more practical than elegant. With fashion’s greater accessibility, clothing came to function more as statement rather than mere garments. A visual commentary on the social, political, and economic was developing, and this discourse was being worn.

Mackenzie leaves us with a brief examination of the 21st Century, when fashion is powerfully affected by that great empire of information exchange, the Internet, and the increasing global accessibility and interchange of goods. With fewer and fewer borders to cultural knowledge and material goods themselves, it seems that modern fashion is the result of converging social, political, ecological, and aesthetic influences from all over the world.

…isms: Understanding Fashion is an excellent point of reference for many of fashion’s separate yet entwined, and convoluted yet accessible histories. It does precisely what it intends to do; Mairi Mackenzie achieves a tangible overview to the history of fashion, and delivers it with a generally unbiased take on the historical, social, and political influences in fashion.

You won’t be debating fashion concepts and influences amongst aficionados out of the breadth of this book. However, you will discover the basis of certain practices that will plant the right amount of intrigue to take you to the library, bookstore, or World Wide Web where you can explore these “isms” further. And then you can debate.

…Isms: Understanding Fashion, by Mairi Mackenzie, Iqon Editions Limited, 2009
Reviewed by Jennifer Carroll

Bonnie English wants to teach you Fashion 101 (minus the student fees and late night study sessions) and she aims to “unravel the complications and contradictions behind stylistic change in order to chart the history of modern fashion.”

A senior lecturer in Art Theory at the Queensland College of Art, English has created a very respectable academic treatment of the last century of fashion. She begins her narrative with Louis XIV, predecessor of metrosexuals everywhere, and extends her analysis into globalized contemporary fashion, with everything from Comme des Garçons to Laura Ashley prints in between. What is most notable about the content of this volume is the way English handles her broad topic; there are some powerful fashion images in this book, but this is no pretty coffee table accessory. English selects unique subjects within fashion for each chapter and zeroes in to prevent a deluge of meaningless and broad historical summaries.

“Swimsuits” by Sonia Delaunay (1928)

Exemplary are musings on Russian Dadaist visual artists and fashion designers Delaunay, Popova, and Stepanova. While they’re not an obvious point of interest within the history of costume, English creates a fashion tradition citing these women as Viktor and Rolf’s Neo-Dadaist forerunners, describing how they brought abstract designs into homes before abstract artists did. In short, English finds specific, and sometimes obscure, moments in dress, and writes her own fashion history canon.

The only real downside of the author’s scholarly style is that her astute dryness might be mistaken for condescension: she writes, “Perfume literally provides a touch of luxury to the mundane life of a middle-class consumer.” Her snooty phrasing is a minor sin, however, considering she pays tribute to the authors and inventors of even the most mundane paraphernalia; apparently my bean bag chair was designed by Gatti, Teodoro, and Paolini in 1968. As well, English makes some impressive connections by ascribing new meaning to common garments. For example, a t-shirt is aligned with “the quest to define ‘self’ amongst postmodernist youth culture.” Chanel is recognized for her methods “to achieve a greater ‘democratization’ of fashion” and Mary Quant’s mini-skirt is indicted as systematically “exclud[ing] older and larger women from being entirely fashionable.”

Mary Quant’s mini-skirts and mod designs.

In A Cultural History of Fashion, English treats fashion as a thoughtful art form. She bases her book on the premise that, “arguably, all fashion is not art, but on occasion it can become art.” It is because of this stance that she can earnestly confront fashion as a deliberate act of design rather than a trendy accident… like jelly sandals. The triumph of the book is its ability to educate people about fashion in broad terms, infusing a renewed curiosity into this sometimes neglected or even dismissed scholarly discipline. I give it an A+.

A Cultural History of Fashion in the 20th Century by Bonnie English (Berg, 2007)
reviewed by Stephanie Herold.