Reviews for Vanity: The Art of Looking Good

The average rating for Vanity: The Art of Looking Good based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-01-22 00:00:00 James Webb John Potvin, "Introduction: Inserting Fashion into Space," pp.1-15: p.1 - Dorothy's ruby slippers take her through the many spaces and places along her journey in the Land of Oz. […] the powerful image of those ruby slippers activated through the desire to be elsewhere serves as a vivid metaphor of fashion's ability to transport the embodied subject to another place and space. p.2 - It must be recognized that space is itself a representational strategy that not only invites in and influences the visibility and visual and material outcome of fashion but also unveils, imposes itself upon, and narrativizes identity. Walter Benjamin was the first to map out the relationship between space, fashion, and modernity. The flâneur's experience of the city were predicated on a narrative of mobility and visibility, one "that relies on interrelation of place for its storyline rather than on a character-driven plot." Space allows, therefore, the embodied subject to narrativize fashion; it translates the idea of fashion into action. p.5 - What Lefebvre evokes is that we might acknowledge how both place and space are constituent of the object and how in turn, as an embodied practice, both might help locate fashion on the map of political and cultural identity. p.6 - As Lefebvre defines, social space "subsumes things produced, and encompasses their interrelationships in their coexistence and simultaneity." This volume interrogates the complexities of the display of fashion as sites and sights of spectacle, desire, pleasure, identity, and performance. In sum, what The Places and Spaces of Fashion, 1800-2007 proposes is a sort of topography marking out various, while not all, spaces which influence the display and representation of fashion. p.9 - Fashion is one of those ways we understand our place in the world, and yet it offers us alternatives. p.13 - Fashion and space do not occur in isolation, but in tandem with other human activities (economic, political, cultural, social).

Review # 2 was written on 2013-06-07 00:00:00 Dave Morris I like this better than The Wardrobe Wakeup by Lois Joy Johnson because while the latter gives the line up for the classics, Closet Smarts acknowledges the fact that not all have the same shape to start with. My only gripe is it could have provided other silhouette for the saddle-bag laden women. I'm just tired of the boot legs and the heels.