Due to a sudden, unexpected passing in the family a few years ago and another more recently and my subsequent (mental) health issues stemming from that, I was unable to download this book in time to review it before it was archived as I did not visit this site for several years after the bereavements. This meant I didn't read or venture onto netgalley for years as not only did it remind me of that person as they shared my passion for reading, but I also struggled to maintain interest in anything due to overwhelming depression. I was therefore unable to download this title in time and so I couldn't give a review as it wasn't successfully acquired before it was archived. The second issue that has happened with some of my other books is that I had them downloaded to one particular device and said device is now defunct, so I have no access to those books anymore, sadly.

This means I can't leave an accurate reflection of my feelings towards the book as I am unable to read it now and so I am leaving a message of explanation instead. I am now back to reading and reviewing full time as once considerable time had passed I have found that books have been helping me significantly in terms of my mindset and mental health - this was after having no interest in anything for quite a number of years after the passings. Anything requested and approved will be read and a review written and posted to Amazon (where I am a Hall of Famer & Top Reviewer), Goodreads (where I have several thousand friends and the same amount who follow my reviews) and Waterstones (or Barnes & Noble if the publisher is American based). Thank you for the opportunity and apologies for the inconvenience

I am not really a fashionable person. I don't know which things go together and sometimes the more abstract fashion choices of celebrities just strike me as weird. I do love, however, to join in on the global fashion criticsm that takes place around the MET gala each year. I love the detail that goes into fashion, the way clothing can express so much, and how much craft and talent goes into the creation of fashion. So I was also very intrigued by this collection, edited by Francesca Granata. I received a copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

The articles collected in 'Fashion Criticism' are mostly from magazines which means they aren't super long. That meant I could pick the book up, read a piece, and then let that sink in while I went about my day. I did enjoy dipping in and out of the collection that way. In general the articles, of course all written by different authors, share a certain kind of witty and sharp style of writing, which I always enjoy. It also features articles from people I recognised, such as Susan Sontag and Oscar Wilde, to names that were completely unknown to me before. A big plus was the way the articles in this collection investigated the way fashion impacts culture and vice versa. There is a lot of attention in these articles for gender, the way masculinity and femininity are performed and given shape in fashion, but race also is given attention.

A little issue I might have with this collection is the title, but that is the academic in me. Criticism in my field, i.e. literature, is often deeply engaged with the act of criticism, its form, its shape, its development. It is quite self-conscious in that way and I always enjoy seeing how the "genre" of literature criticism has evolved over the decades. That is not super evident in this collection, which is why the 'Criticism' element of the title didn't entirely work for me.

Overall, I found this a really intriguing collection of writing on fashion. I don't know if it will improve my own taste, but I will definitely have more informed takes next time I judge fashion.

If you have an interest in visual arts, textiles, history, gender, sexism, and/or journalism then this book is for you! It is an accessible and much needed book critically exploring fashion throughout history. A really great read.

Informative, well researched and engrossing. An excellent book that mixes social and historical observations and made me learn a lot.
Highly recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine

3/5 stars

Thanks to the publisher, author and Netgalley for providing this e-arc!

This book was not as bad as expected. I was expecting a more close-minded view on the industry but i loved being proven wrong.

Fashion Criticism is a fairly-priced anthology of fashion criticism edited by Francesca Granata, the Associate Professor of Fashion Studies at Parsons School of Design. According to the dictionary, criticism is “the analysis and judgement of the merits and faults of a literary or artistic work”. Although I’d suggest that some of the pieces in the book perhaps don’t really meet that description and are simply fashion journalism, they are nonetheless worth gathering in an anthology. To be fair, Granata does mention Lars Svendsen’s argument in her introduction that “genuine fashion criticism sits somewhere between fashion reportage and fashion theory”

The book is divided into three parts:
- Late Nineteenth Century – 1960s (13 pieces)
- 1970s-1990s (17 pieces)
- Twenty-first Century (13 pieces)

The first piece was written by Oscar Wilde and published in the Pall Mall Gazette in 1884. Wilde later edited the magazine “The Woman’s World”, from which the second piece is taken. I hadn’t read the whole of the second piece before and a couple of sentences stuck me:

“Fashion is such an essential part of the mundus muliebris of our day that it seems to me absolutely necessary that its growth, development, and phrases should be duly chronicled; and the historical and practical value of such a record depends entirely upon its perfect fidelity to fact.”

and

“I must, however, protest against the idea that to chronicle the development of Fashion implies any approval of the particular forms that Fashion may adopt.”

He also said (not quoted in this book), “I myself would like to see dressmaking regarded not merely as a learned profession, but as a fine art.”

Good old Oscar!

Granata includes Kennedy Fraser’s excellent New Yorker article from 1977, “… audiences are to be discouraged from forming impressions of fashion shows which are based on the clothes alone.” In the same way, this book isn’t about clothes alone. It documents how contemporary critics saw the world of fashion at that time: yes, the clothes, but also the designers and other journalists/journals. We learn from Elizabeth Hawes in 1938 that she told most American newspapers everything in Paris was divine, chic, etc. but then told the New Yorker what she really thought, e.g., that “Molyneux was a good safe designer with not too much originality.” “The New Yorker, ladies and gentlemen, is the only magazine I ever saw which had the guts to let its fashion reporters speak their minds.” Kennedy Fraser’s same article gives us an insight into the transition from catwalk shows to multi-media “experiences” – “One sometimes yearns, as one trudges round the collections from this extravagant entertainment to that stimulating performance, for the days when fashion shows were fashion shows”.

Fraser’s article exemplifies many things:
- It captures the mood of the times with its mention of dance and theatre
- It gives details of the collections, e.g., the teazel, the trimmings, etc.
- It describes the designer’s work in a way that sets it apart from others, e.g., Calvin Klein’s
- The descriptions are ornate – perhaps reminiscent of Oscar Wilde?
- It recognises that its not just clothing “…all clothing is an extension of a woman’s psyche”.

I found some of the pieces didn’t resonate with me but I have no doubt that you might love them whilst finding my favourites boring. That’s the joy of an anthology: it should provide some old favourites and introduce us to new companions.

I liked the chronological presentation of the pieces. With fashion, I think the context of the contemporary culture and mores are important – there is a symbiotic relationship one should understand.

If I have one reservation, it’s based upon a comment in Granata’s introduction, where she says (rightly) that the anthology is not meant to be exhaustive but (more worryingly) that “its scope and breadth [are] limited […] by the maddening and seemingly arbitrary nature of copyright laws and costs.” Does this mean she compromised on content and chose what was cheap? Could it have been ever better?

#FashionCriticism #NetGalley

This is a groundbreaking anthology of fashion criticism collected from the last 200 years that includes historical essays from Oscar Wilde, journalism through the ‘70s and ‘80s, to the bloggers of today. Will be of particular interest to fashion programs and fashionistas the world over.

This is a really interesting anthology of writings on fashion through history, putting together a variety of pieces all centered around different aspects of fashion criticism. I particularly found the early writings to be the most fascinating as they looked forward to trends that have now come true in the 21st century, especially tied to fashion and gender. They provided an incredibly meaningful context even to modern day writings on fashion. I was really interested in all of the different articles chosen and was genuinely surprised that this field has not seen an anthology like this yet. I hope this book marks a shift in the realm of writings on fashion that properly highlight just how important these writings are in our understanding of fashion, where it's been and where it's going. I highly recommend.

An absolutely well-curated anthology; Granata's book is informative and highly recommended to anyone who has never dived into the subject of fashion and the critical theories surrounding it.

This was really interesting and almost slightly indulgent. Didn't as much enjoy the 21st century articles as much as I wanted to and would've preferred some context to the authors and time periods etc.

An intelligent collection that catches more interest pre-1960, a slightly disappointing lack of articles from the 60s that could have been useful to counter the now romanticised Didion writings, but however the articles from the 70s do present a interesting retrospect on the previous decade particular in the words of Angela Carter (as strong a writer as always). Some of the lesser articles collected seem to suit themselves in an air of abitrariness namedropping Freud or Sontag without particular delving deeper into why but this is more reflective of how our wider society automatically makes associations with those names, they have become symbols, something this collections sort of touches on is how Symbols work in fashion. The collection from the 21st century is largely stale especially the piece on Comme des garçons, but the McQueen article was good.

'We tried very hard to read Ulysses and I failed' - Elizabeth Hawes 1938

A great book that goes deep into the fashion world. I particularly enjoyed the chapter “what happened to the Afro?” Fashion isn’t just about clothes, it can be a social movement and can completely shift perspective on culture. Definitely a great read if you enjoy going in-depth about fashion.

This is a fascinating collection of articles that is aimed at the fashion/media student but which is just as stimulating and enjoyable to the general reader. I would, though, quibble about the title: is it really fashion *criticism*? Or just fashion journalism or writing?

While Granata is right to foreground the lack of status generally attributed to fashion writing, these pieces, selected from newspapers and magazines, do not interrogate or scrutinise either the terms of reference ('fashion', 'criticism') or really turn an eye back on either content or methodology in the way that, say, literary, film or art criticism does - there's no theorising, no self-analysis, no self-consciousness of what these individual pieces and writers might be doing. There's only a light historicised 'tradition; of what 'fashion writing' might be and do. For example, one of the few articles by an 'outsider' to the fashion industry is Susan Sontag's 'Looking with Avedon' from 1978 which I'd expected to explicitly apply gaze theory to fashion photography (Laura Mulvey's seminal essay on the male gaze in visual culture having been published in 1975 during the second-wave of feminist theorising) but no, it's perhaps there as a covert underpinning to the piece, but the lack of any kind of engaged intellectual underpinning is what makes me mentally file these pieces as journalism but not criticism.

That said, the articles collected here (most of which are short pieces recognisable from their magazine origins) showcase wit, some excellent writing, knowledge of fashion and the industry, and the ability to think about fashion in terms of its cultural significance and the way it negotiates identity both for a group and the individual. Gender is often to the forefront (and the articles are attentive to constructions of masculinity as well as femininity, even androgyny which fashion has long embraced), as is race (great article from Bebe Moore Campbell on afro hair from Ebony in 1982). More recent articles from 2016-18 look at presidential fashion, for example, and the loss of the tie as men in politics try to convey that they are also 'men of the people' - ditto, the rolled up sleeves look worked so well by Barack Obama.

So I'd absolutely recommend this to anyone fascinated by fashion and fashion writing, and the chronological arrangement offers an intriguing glimpse into how what we fantasise over, desire, buy and wear is so much more that just what what we put on in the morning.