Fashion, Desire and Anxiety - Rebecca Arnold

Fashion, and the glossy magazines it inhabits, allow Western culture to
dream. It permits a person to fantasize and to experiment with new
identities. It flaunts glamour and success. Appearance becomes something
to be perfected and admired.

These dreams and freedoms, Rebecca
Arnold proposes, are contradictory. Fashion and its surrounding imagery
elicit fear and anxiety in their consumers as well as pleasure. Fashion
has come to incorporate the underside of modern life, with violence and
decay becoming a dominant theme in clothing design and photography.

Arnold
draws on diverse written sources to explore the complex nature of
modern fashion. She discusses a range of key themes: how fashion uses
and abuses the power of wealth; the alienating promotion of "good"
taste; the power plays of sex and display; and how identities can be
blurred to disguise and confuse. In order to unravel the contradictory
emotions of desire and anxiety they provoke, she never loses sight of
the historical and cultural contexts in which fashion designers and
photographers perform.

Generously illustrated, Fashion, Desire
and Anxiety focuses on the last thirty years, from photographic works of
the 1970s to the beginning of the twenty-first century.