Reading Fashion in Art

Abstract

Dress and fashion are central to our understanding of art. From the stylization of the body to subtle textile embellishments and richly symbolic colors, dress tells a story and provides clues as to the cultural beliefs of the time in which artworks were produced. This concise and accessible book provides a step-by-step guide to analysing dress in art, including paintings, photographs, drawings and art installations.. The first section of the book includes an introduction to visual analysis and explains how to 'read' fashion and dress in an artwork using the checklists. The second section offers case studies which demonstrate how artworks can be analysed from the point of view of key themes including status and identity, modernity, ideals of beauty, gender, race, globalization and politics. The book includes iconic as well as lesser known works of art, including work by Elisabeth Vigée le Brun, Thomas Gainsborough, James Jacques Tissot, Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray, Yinka Shonibare, Mickalene Thomas, Kent Monkman and many others.. Reading Fashion in Art is the perfect text for students of fashion coming to art history for the first time as well as art history students studying dress in art and will be an essential handbook for any gallery visitor. The step-by-step methodology helps the reader learn to look at any work of art that includes the dressed or undressed body and confidently develop a critical analysis of what they see.

Influential women and dress in Renaissance Italy: Power and identity in portraiture

“…After obtaining digital access to the selected portraits, I followed Mida's (2020) method in Reading Fashion in Art, which provides a comprehensive seventy-question checklist for interpreting fashion in multiple visual art forms. Mida (2020) describes her approach to art analysis as "the slow approach to seeing" (p. 15), which is divided into three steps: observation (40 questions), reflection (35 questions), and interpretation (5 questions). The observation step aims to gather information about the artwork, such as artist information, composition, details about the painted fashioned body, and other artistic stylistic qualities.…”

“…The primary sources for data collection were Renaissance women portraits. Mida (2020) identified painted portraits as an ideal medium of data for this time period: "In commissioning a portrait, most sitters hope for a flattering representation and will carefully select their clothing…, and this allows the dress detective to analyze the portrait to consider the sitter's presentation of social identity through dress" (p. 100). Mida (2020) is an art specific iteration of Mida and Kim (2015)'s The Dress Detective, one of the prominent texts for analyzing historic fashion imagery.…”

“…The source locations identified were all publicly recognized institutions or had a .gov or .org URL (Sikarskie, 2020). Additionally, the selected portraits are dated to within the lifetime of the women or within the 16 th century in order to obtain a more credible depiction of the women (Gottschalk, 1969;Fitzpatrick, 2007;Mida, 2020). Women with a lack of credible portraits were excluded from this study.…”