Contents: Introduction: fashion and the practice of history: a political legacy, Beverly Lemire; Part I Fashion Practice in Early Modern Europe: Middlemen and the creation of a 'fashion revolution': the experience of Antwerp in the late 17th and 18th centuries, Ilja van Damme; Fabricating the domestic: the material culture of textiles and the social life of the home in early modern Europe, Giorgio Riello; Luxury, fashion and peasantry: the introduction of new commodities in rural Catalan, 1670-1790, Belén Moreno Claverías. Part II The Politics and Practice of Fashion in the Long 19th Century: Fashion sprayed and displayed: the market for perfumery in 19th-century Paris, Eugénie Briot; 'Fashion has extended her influence to the cause of humanity': the transatlantic female economy of the Boston antislavery bazaar, Alice Taylor; Silk and sartorial politics in the Sokoto caliphate (Nigeria), 1804-1903, Colleen E. Kriger. Part III Fashion Strategies, Global Practice: Designing, producing and enacting nationalisms: contemporary Amerindian fashions in Canada, Cory Willmott; Reclaiming materials and fashion-work in the urban Philippines, B. Lynne Milgram; The city, clothing consumption, and the search for 'the latest' in colonial and postcolonial Zambia, Karen Tranberg Hansen; Bibliography; Index.

Beverly Lemire, University of Alberta, Canada

Throughout history, fashion has emerged as one of the most powerful driving forces determining the political, economic and social ramifications of the production, distribution and circulation of goods. Indeed fashion, especially in relation to clothing and textiles, shapes the relationship between self and society in unique ways. In this light, the collected papers in this volume position fashion as the lens - the critical mediating force - through which to analyse and understand cultural, economic and political shifts within a broad spectrum of societies in Europe, Asia, Africa and America from the seventeenth to twenty-first centuries. Topics include a seventeenth-century failing fashion region, the material politics of marketing American abolitionist fashions, the construction of a fashionable ethos for French perfumes, and the use and meanings of clothing and textiles in the politics of Nigerian silk robes and early modern domestic décor in Europe. This volume represents an important shift in scholarship towards a more in-depth understanding of the role of fashion in early modern and modern times and will appeal to international readers interested in material culture, fashion, consumer studies and cultural anthropology, among other areas.