Fabrications: Costume and the Female Body (AFI Film Readers)

"Fabrications" asks questions about the construction of the female body in post-industrial culture, from the turn-of-the-century colossal statuary to 1950s Sweethart fashions to contemporary body-building. Here, American feminist film theory converges on British cultural studies as critics from both sides of the Atlantic consider the connections between the female consumer and the female viewer, the motion picture industry and the ready wear industry, the fashion in critical theory and the fashion in clothes. The book starts with a single germ in feminist film theory - the "to be looked at" aesthetic which Laura Mulvey describes - and pushes this further, considering the pleasure women derive from an opulent and spectacular consumer culture as a whole, and weighing these satisfactions against the social costs they have historically paid as wives, mothers, and workers. These essays also look beyond the first feminist analyses of patriarchal culture to consider women's own contributions to the production of the body, as consumers, spectators, fashion designers, or seamstresses.