Fashion nation : picturing the United States in the long nineteenth century / Sandra Tomc.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Tomc, Sandra, author.

Contributor:

Michigan Publishing (University of Michigan), publisher.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Fashion--United States--History--19th century.

Fashion.

Clothing and dress--United States--History--19th century.

Clothing and dress.

United States--Civilization--19th century.

United States.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (303 pages)

Place of Publication:

Ann Arbor, Michigan : University of Michigan Press, 2021.

Summary:

In the late nineteenth century, the United States was known internationally as a place full of gaudiness and glitter. While scholars have long assumed that this visual excess was literal, linked to the United States' utilization of sophisticated modern light and consumer technologies, Fashion Nation argues that far from being linked to technology or consumerism, the reputation of the United States as a place of glittery bodies and landscapes was rooted in early nineteenth-century British and European ethnic nationalism, and the fashion of wearing colorful ethnic costuming that was adopted as part of these movements. In this work, Sandra Tomc traces the history of the idea of America as a gauche, flashy place from its early proliferation in the 1820s and 1830s, when American flashiness was associated primarily with colorful clothes, to its fruition in late nineteenth-century mass entertainment when the notion of American visual audacity shifted from clothes to elaborate lights and technological displays. Tomc argues that in the wake of pressure in the first half of the nineteenth century to embrace racially and ethnically saturated national types, significant branches of U.S. nationalist culture developed national types distinguished by their refusal to divulge racial and ethnic affiliation. To make its case, Fashion Nation reads literature alongside an extraordinary, colorful, and largely forgotten archive of international costume books, theatrical spectacles, travelogues, and world's fair extravaganzas to show how America was textually and visually constructed for transatlantic audiences.

Contents:

Intro

Contents

Acknowledgments

List of Illustrations

Introduction

One. American Looks

Two. Restyling an Old World: Metropolitan Fashion in the Antebellum United States

Three. "Clothes upon Sticks": The Settler Colonial Sartorial Eye

Four. Some Inscrutable Flattery of the Atmosphere: The Ethnic Nation in the White City

Conclusion

Notes

Index.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 261-282) and index.

Description based on information from the publisher.

ISBN:

9780472129010

0472129015

OCLC:

1243162758