Summary of one book and one article

The fabric of culture



Eugenia, P and Hazel（2009）USA, Routledge.



This book describes the interaction and relations between culture and the colth. Culture is a groups (can be a State, or national, corporate, family) over a given period of formation of thoughts, ideas, practices, customs and traditions, personalities, and representatives from the groups overall awareness of the radiation from all activities. Because of Geographical differences, it will bring up a different culture. Different culture will influences of the cloth deeply. It can affect many aspects, such as color, pattern, material and so on.

The main purpose of this book is analyzing the fabric of culture through Fashion, Identity, and Globalization. Fashion is both public and private, material and symbolic, always caught within the lived experience and providing an incredible tool to study culture and history.

The fabric of Cultures examines the impact of fashion as a manufacturing industry and as a culture industry that shapes the identities of nation and cities in a cross-cultural perspective, within a global framework. It investigate local and global economies, cultures and identities and the book offers, for the first time, a wide spectrum of case studies which focus on a diversity of geographical spaces and places, from global capitals of fashion such as New York, to countries less known or identifiable for fashion such as contemporary Greece and Soviet Russia.

The most important information in this book is dressing through nation. For example, it told us the Indian cinema costume and the making of national fashion. After Indian independence, cinema played an integral role in public life not only as a source of entertainment. Cinema had a particularly influential impact in metropolitan areas, where increasingly women were entering the public sector. Looking to film characters as models of the new order, urban woman will try this dress. Beyond the screen, film advertisements and magazines infiltrated the urban landscape, further integrating the cinematic image into daily life. Most critics have agreed that Antonioni’s films create a new cinematic language and visual poetry in which his characters, their identities, and their narratives dissolve. Clothing plays an integral part in this project. At first sight, this might seem an insurmountable contradiction since it is impossible not to acknowledge intimate links between dress and the formation of identity. It is , however, only an apparent paradox because what clothing does in Antonioni’s films is, on the one hand , to articulate the relationship between clothing and identity, and, on the other, to reveal, through fashion and cinema, how clothing becomes an integral part of cultural mediation. So clothes never simply an obvious and unambiguous representation of characters in film. Clothing participates in aesthetic process and journey with its texture, design, fabric, and cut.

The author also looking at fabric and fashion design in global. Goods are linked to material culture changing over time and space. Goods are traded in a globalized economy, both as commodities and as brands. Jeans are truly the palimpsest of cultural and technical capital formation. In fashion terms, jeans have been transformed from a classic item with archetypical features to a bearer of a wide range of style elements, entailing a complex grammar in which features can be endlessly recombined. The innovation pattern for postmodern jeans is truly global in its adoption by consumers, albeit with regional difference.












Chinese Textile Design


Gao Hanyu,(1992) Endland, Penguin group



The main purpose of this article is through Chinese cultural characteristics of different times to show the various textile design like patterns, materials, applications, skills, and so on. The author provides a detailed history of technological developments associated with the production of cloth and clothing. The author also makes full use of ancient Chinese texts in his discussion of the social and political significance of coloured and decorated fabrics throughout Chinese history. Some of the most important of these designs are illustrated in this beautiful volume in which the author , Gao Hanyu, an eminent Chinese scholar in the field of fabric technology, discusses all the significant archaeological material and uses it to explain the development of spinning, weaving, printing, dyeing and embroidery in China.

The most important information in this article is Cheongsam. It has gained associations with Chinese women during the twentieth century. Its history is bound up with social, economic, and political change, and with patterns of migration. As fashion today becomes increasingly international and multi-cultural, many designers are inspired by Chinese clothing and decorative motifs. Yet few people——western or Chinese——understand the historic significance of Chinese clothing. The author explore the evolution of Chinese dress, from the dragon robes and lotus shoes of the imperial era to the creation of new fashion like the cheongsam that symbolized modern Chinese identity. Cultures tend to have deep-seated preferences for particular kinds of colth, embracing both types of fiber and techniques of weaving-for examples, the preference of the Egyptians for linen, and of the Celts for woolen plaid twill. Such preferences reflect, in part, local differences in plant and animal fiber resources, but over time they become embedded in the notion of cultural identity itself. In China this phenomenon expressed itself very strongly as a preference for silk over all other kinds of cloth, and a general dislike of woolen cloth.

The author is also looking at how Chinese fashion influenced Western fashion. During the past decade alone, a host of designers from around the world have been inspired by visions of China. John Galliano did an entire collection for Christian Dior based on the ideas of Shang hai in the 1930s. indeed, ever since about 1993, the cheongsam has appeared regularly on French fashion runways. At that time as the cheongsam was becoming more universalized as a fashion statement, it was also being reclaimed as a signifier of cultural identity in China. At the same time, international travel became much easier, which the result that both fashion designers and consumers became more familiar with foreign dress. Throughout the 1950s and early 1960s western fashion designers occasionally utilized Chinese dress styles and design motifs. The cheongsam, in particular, achieved a certain popularity in the wake of the movie The world of Suzy Wrong.