Denis Bruna

Fashioning the Body is the catalogue to a fantastic exhibition on the history of fashion as body modification that ran in Paris in 2013 and then at the Bard Graduate Center of in New York City, where I saw it, in 2015. Beginning in the early modern era and continuing through today, the book covers how people have used fashion to modify and change their silhouettes, whether it is adding to the body through padding and frameworks (e.g. false calves, crinolines) or by modifying the body itself (e.g. corsets, shapewear). What is nice is that it focuses both on male and female fashion, instead of just being lazy and only covering women's wear, as if women were the only ones who did crazy things to look good.

The historical sections of the book are fantastic and full of all kinds of interesting information. The contemporary section is far weaker. Perhaps because of the focus on fashion as art, it does not seem to capture the motivations of those who wear wonderbras and spanx the way it did panniers. The pop culture references are also a bit odd: it discusses Mr. Pearl but not Dita Von Teese and talks about a rapper named Marky Mark without mentioning he's also had a rather successful acting career as Mark Wahlberg. There is also a rather perceptible feeling throughout the book that the authors have a dichotomy in their minds of freedom versus confinement, which I'm not sure is the best one to have when discussing this subject. But overall it's a wonderful work and I can highly recommend it.… (más)