Culture and Everyday Life provides students with a comprehensive overview of theoretical models, issues and examples of contemporary cultural practice. Andy Bennett begins by summarising and situating - in everyday settings - the key theoretical models applied in the study of existing cultural practices. This entails a systematic study of how academic thinking about mass culture has changed, from critical accounts of early mass cultural theorists to radical postmodernist critiques of mass cultural accounts and to 'the cultural turn', which explored how various social identities are culturally constructed.

Fashion

Fashion

Fashion is an ontological domain; in and through an interaction with fashion subjectivities are literally made and worldly relations established between clothes and bodies. In everyday speech … we speak of the ‘body’ that is subject to the clothes that literally enclothe it with a significance. (Gill, 1998: 43)

Of the many commodities and leisure resources through which individuals in contemporary society construct and play out identities in the course of their everyday lives, fashion plays a central role. According to Storry and Childs, ‘the way that we dress can serve either to confirm or to subvert various facets of our identities, such as our gender, race, class and age’ (1997: 171). As this observation suggests, by assembling particular items of fashion in particular ways, ...

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