"ARE CLOTHES MODERN ?" BERNARD RUDOFSKY Paul Theobald 1947 FIRST EDITION HCDJ EX

Description: A recent estate find along with a library of many scarce books of Fashion, Design and Textiles. Other titles I shall list shortly... This listing is for " ARE CLOTHES MODERN ? " by Bernard Rudofsky Paul Theobald, Chicago, 1947. FIRST EDITION Hardcover with dust jacket. Condition: EXCELLENT CONDITION TO BOTH BOOK AND DUST JACKET !! The New Yorker magazine (July 11, 2019), has an article by Troy Patterson about this book,"The Essay to Read If You Even Think About Wearing Clothes". Quoting from the article: "It is the catalogue essay for a 1944 exhibition curated by Rudofsky, the influence of which extended to the 2017 MOMA exhibition 'Items: Is Fashion Modern?' Rudofsky's writing style is conjectural, aphoristic, coolly passionate, generally fantastic. Deploying broad historical knowledge and a keen comparative eye, he does an enormous amount of discoursing around the premise that 'the clothes we wear today are anachronistic, irrational and harmful.'' The accompanying illustrations, uniformly delightful, include a juxtaposition of the patterns of traditional Marquesan tattoos with those of late-Victorian hosiery. Pages 120 and 121 boast a jazzy graphic mapping the twenty-four pockets and seventy buttons of a mid-century man fully dressed in a suit and overcoat. 'What glass beads are to the savage, buttons and pockets are to the civilized,' Rudofsky writes, intending no disrespect to primitive culture. On the contrary, his analysis flows from the belief that the physical constrictions of Western clothing, like the capitalist contortions required by the system of producing and consuming them, often represents the corruption of ancient desires for bodily decoration. He gives a rich account of what has been thought attractive and appropriate on various continents in various centuries, braided through with a progressive manifesto in favor of renouncing such shackles as throttling collars. . . . He admires such reformers as Amelia Bloomer, whose fight for the right to vote was entwined with her advocacy of trousers, and he smiles on promising signs of the advent of the equalization of men's and women's clothing. Rudofsky wrote thrillingly tart prose, as when condensing a historical overview of an undergarment into a one-sentence story of transfiguration: 'This corset which first was used as a remedy for supposed shapelessness, later became a focus of erotic attraction, wound up by being an indispensable requisite of decency'. . . . Rudofsky was writing only a generation after the corset went out of style. The zipper was new enough that he calls it a 'slide fastener. His distance only enhances his relevance and encourages the contemporary reader's sense of perspective. Rudofsky seems, now, prophetic for anticipating 'play-clothes'-athletic gear and beach wear-as 'the starting-point for the creation of a genuine contemporary apparel'. . . . Rudofsky's agitation in favor of sensible design included the creation, with his wife, Berta, of a shoemaking enterprise, named Bernardo Sandals. The sandals, with their healthfully flat leather soles that follow the outlines of the foot and their straps like festive riffs on rustic tradition, were a favorite of Jane Birkin and Jacqueline Bouvier. . . .These utopian artifacts are souvenirs of a mind that begins 'Are Clothes Modern?' with an unexpurgated retelling of the Grimms' version of 'Cinderella,' where a maiden amputates a toe to force her foot to fit the precious shoe, and that returns to that theme about two hundred pages later. 'The modern shoe is among the articles of dress whose improvement is retarded by the fact that it is an erotic implement,' Rudofsky writes. 'The generation that will see the end of the barbarical initiation custom of putting females on high heels, and the young man whose emotions will still function without the stimulus of Cinderella's slipper, will fare better.'

Price: 249 USD

Location: San Francisco, California

End Time: 2025-02-04T07:58:24.000Z

Shipping Cost: 5.38 USD