Fashioning the Feminine: Representation and Women's Fashion from the Fin De Siècle to the Present [Paperback]

The cover page scene on this book shows a 'typical girl's night out' scenario of young women in North East England being dressed-up for a 'night on the town' - walking around the town itself. To understand the manner in which the foreground women are dressed would not just entail asking similar young women 'how they think they are dressed', and what it was that led them to `dress in that way'.

What Buckley and Fawcett have done is to put together a well-researched, academically well-written text that would be of interest to anyone wishing to understand the fashion system in the UK as it currently stands and how this position was arrived at. The development of clothing production and the growth of women's fashion sales in department stores and more latterly, in more specialist clothing shops - is given its rightful relevance to the current UK 'fashion scene' in the book.

Fashioning the Feminine is, in essence, about an in-depth examination of factors impacting on British fashion - immediately prior to, and throughout the entire twentieth century - in the process, defining the relationships that exist between fashion, gender and feminine representation. Building on the foundations put in place by texts such as Elizabeth Wilson's "Adorned in Dreams" and "Chic Thrills" which Wilson co-edited with Juliet Ash, for example - Buckley and Fawcett's key construct asserts that in historical context, that fashion has in fact created feminine identities in a set of complex and interacting ways. Arguing that, at the turn of the twentieth century, what was regarded as the fashionable ideal pre-empted modernity, essentially, the commoditisation of femininity was a key factor in the establishing of modernity itself. Developments to the mass-production of clothing, and the ways in which the ideal consumer was both constructed and pursued by an ever-expanding fashion retail trade, are emphasised by the authors. The broader social changes - and the shift in acceptable notions of morality, sexuality and self-representation go hand-in-hand with the sweeping changes being enacted across society as a whole, are additionally given their rightful place.

Also noting the cultural construction of femininity through `devices' such as women's magazines, the once incredibly popular cinema, and the early days of television - asserting that the fashionable female body was no mere passive construction of the fashion industry, rather that fashion empowered women to express themselves in ways hitherto not possible. The book simply, provides a very refreshing insight as to how today's `image of modern woman' is constructed through a host of influences in ways in which today's women can publicly express themselves, in the realms of both daytime every-day-life, and in their social lives in the evening which calls on particularly ways of representing themselves and the femininity the clothes they wear suggest they belong. While being academically well-written - the book is accessible to the general reader and bares no hallmark of avoidable complex language to describe what it means so unnecessary in many books aimed at an academic audience.