Performance Costume: New Perspectives and Methods

Publication Details Format Hardback + PAPER, Edition 1st, Extent 424 pp., Illustrations 124 color, Dimensions 10 x 7 inches. ISBN 13: 9781350098794, ISBN: 10. 1350098795

Author and/or Editor name/s Editors: Sofia Pantouvaki and Peter McNeil

Author and/or Editor bio/s Distinguished Professor Peter McNeil FAHA is an award-winning design historian at UTS internationally known for his work on the visual culture of fashion. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and previous Section Head for ‘The Arts’. His inter-disciplinary research examines the past, present and future of critical fashion as well as many other aspects of art and design with a focus on identities and material culture from the eighteenth century to the present day. For a decade he was Professor of Fashion Studies at Stockholm University where he worked to establish the dignity of the topic in the European university system. He was the first design academic to be awarded a FiDiPro/Academy of Finland Invitational Distinguished Professorship at Aalto University (2014-18). This book is an outcome of that research project.

Year of Publication 2021

Publisher Bloomsbury, London

Abstract Costume is an active agent for performance-making; it is a material object that embodies ideas shaped through collaborative creative work. A new focus in recent years on research in the area of costume has connected this practice in vital and new ways with theories of the body and embodiment, art and design practices, artistic and other forms of collaboration. Costume, like fashion and dress, is now viewed as an area of dynamic social significance and not simply as passive reflector of a pre-conceived social state or practice. This book offers new approaches to the study of costume, as well as fresh insights into the better-understood frames of historical, theoretical, practice-based and archival research into costume for performance.