Product Description: Focusing specifically on Thomas Gainsborough’s portraits of well-known, “liberated”, society women, Thomas Gainsborough and the Modern Woman draws us away from his predominant reputation as a landscape painter. It shows how such portraits were both an affirmation by Gainsborough of his own position in the artistic world of Georgian England, and of the desire of his famous, and often notorious, sitters to be seen as self-assured progressive women...read more

Moralists have raged throughout history against various fashions for being too short, too long, too tight, too loose or too costly. Highlighting the times when choice of dress was a moral minefield, this enlightening and entertaining book looks at fashion extremes over the centuries, from the sexual display of the codpiece through to corsets, crinolines and décolletage. Providing a sharp and humorous look at the outright risqué as well as the grotesquely exaggerated and even the repulsive, Ribeiro shows how dress has functioned variously as a vehicle of righteousness or turpitude and as an expression of sexuality, class or social status. In 747 St Boniface deemed wide stripes and scarlet borders to incite lust and ruination of the soul. Well over a millennium later immodest dress ranked high in Jesuit Father Bernard Vaughan's book on the sins of society. Medical practitioners once labelled the v-necked top, now a standard style, 'the pneumonia neckline'. Was it the force of society or sheer vanity of fashion that drove women to wear sleeves the size of balloons? Are sexual boundaries between dress worn by men and women diminishing? What morals still bind us to our Judeo-Christian heritage and lead us to express ourselves through appearances?Lavishly illustrated and packed with countless thought-provoking quotes, Dress and Morality is an in-depth exploration of the comical vanities and social etiquettes associated with dress in the past. At last here is the much-anticipated updated edition of this classic book.

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Product Description: Costume, portraiture, and the presentation of self have been closely linked throughout the history of art. Yet while the face of the person portrayed is still accessible to the modern viewer, the meaning of the sitter's clothes has often been lost to history...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Meticulously drawn and based on a variety of sources, the illustrations provide a guide to the history and development of dress. Beginning with ancient history through to the 19th century, each illustration is accompanied by a description. (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Court and Conquest: Ottoman Origins & the Design for Handel's "Tamerlano" at the Glimmerglass Opera

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Product Description: The core of the book consists of over 200 contemporary illustrations of dress, arranged in order of date for easy reference. They include paintings, drawings, photographs, advertisements, stone effigies and brass rubbings. A detailed introduction sets out the background to the evolution of clothing over the centuries, the broad changes themselves, and some guidance on how to look to contemporary sources for information on costume history...read more

Product Description: Reaching from the 14th to the 20th century, over 200 contemporary full-page illustrations appear in this history of costume, with comments and explanatory notes on the head, body and accessories of each outfit. A glossary is also included which functions as a concise dictionary of dress in itself...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Edinburgh published Arts (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: This book traces the evolution of fashionable legwear from the cloth hose of Tudor times, through the hand-knitted stockings of the Elizabethan period to the tights and legwarmers of today. Fashion trends are seen against a background of technological and social change...read more

Portraits and drawings of the eighteenth-century nobility and middle class show examples of hats, hair styles, clothing, and accessories then popular