Fashion and Materiality: Cultural Practices in Global Context, a new book co-edited by Heike Jenss, associate professor of Fashion Studies at Parsons and Viola Hofmann, lecturer at TU Dortmund University, will be released Thursday, October 17^th by Bloomsbury. The book presents chapters from international scholars, including Parsons faculty Leyla Belkaid-Neri, Otto von Busch and Christina Moon.

Fashion is intimately tied to the material world. With a focus on diverse cultural practices, this book offers new insights into the dynamic relationships between fashion, bodies, and material culture. In a series of original case studies, both historical and contemporary, the collection explores how fashion and clothing affect articulations of body and self, experiences of time and place, and the shaping of social and local/global relationships.

Fashion and Materiality takes the reader from the study of clothing and biography, and an early modern “foreign dress” collection, to Chinoiserie clothing in 18th-century Europe and fast fashion production in today’s China. The book also examines fashion’s role in nation building, and entanglements between fashion and migration across clothing donations for Syrian refugees in Germany and the circulation of “refugee chic” on international fashion runways. Scrutinizing the dense connections between fashion, clothing, materiality, and humanity, the book shows how the material interacts forcefully with the personal and political.

This book is dedicated to Gabriele Mentges, Professor Emerita of the Institute of Cultural Anthropology of Textiles at TU Dortmund University, Germany.

Heike Jenss is Associate Professor of Fashion Studies and director of the MA Fashion Studies program, at Parsons School of Design, The New School, New York.

Viola Hofmann is lecturer at the Institute of Arts and Material Culture at TU Dortmund University, Germany.