Product Description: The late nineteenth-century invention of "fashion" as we understand it today inspired avant-garde artists of the period to create an art form to counter commercial fashion. These artists saw clothing not as a symbol of class distinction but as a force for shaping experience -- an opportunity to make things new, to go beyond the traditional boundaries of art...read more

A fascinating guide to the movement of 'fashion as art' in the first half the twentieth century surveys the avant-garde's appropriation of clothing, featuring more than one hundred illustrations from this groundbreaking and controversial period in art history. (Beauty & Fashion)