Street style : from sidewalk to catwalk

Abstract

This is an up-beat look at street fashion from 1940 to today, celebrating some 40 different styletribes, which will accompany a major exhibition on Streetstyle at the Victoria and Albert Museum in November 1994. We see how the styletribes interweave and evolve - the American Modernists of the early 1950s living on in the English Mods of the early 1960s, who became the Hard Mods, then the Skinheads, then the Ois!; while the 1950s Folkies became first the 1970s Hippies and then the New Age Travellers of the 1980s and 1990s. But for today's fashion-conscious young people, this is not all ancient history: Streetstyle offers the 1990s fashion world a supermarket of styles from which to pick and mix. Anyone is free to be part Beatnik, part Raver, or part Punk, part Grunge; Goths one day and Indie Kids the next. More than 200 illustrations, including 100 in colour, document the styles and their wearers - on the street, but also on the high-fashion catwalk, to which streetstyle has made an enormous, if perhaps unwilling, contribution. Ted Polhemus's many books include Fashion and Anti Fashion, Popstyles, Social Aspects of the Human Body, Bodystyles and Rituals of Love. He is the external curator of the Streetstyle exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum.

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