Books on the topic 'Silk garments'

Beijing Opera Costumes: The Visual Communication of Character and Culture illuminates the links between theatrical attire and social customs and aesthetics of China, covering both the theory and practice of stage dress. Distinguishing attributes include an introduction to the performance style, the delineation of the costume conventions, an analysis of the costumes through their historical precedents and theatrical modifications, and the use of garment shape, color, and embroidery for symbolic effect. Practical information covers dressing the performers, understanding a costume plot, creating the makeup designs and hairstyles, and patterning for the major garments. Photographs from live performances, as well as details of embroidery, and close-up photographs of the headdresses thoroughly portray the stunning beauty of this incomparable performance style. Presenting the brilliant colors of the elaborately embroidered silk costumes together with the intricate makeup and glittering headdresses, this volume embodies the elegance of the Beijing opera.

Women wearing pants poses provocative questions: When did it start? Who invented this fashion? How scandalous was it? Were women really arrested? Prior to the 1920s it was a rarity to see women in the Western world wearing pants, but as the silk pajama trouser suit moved from the boudoir to the beach in the early 1920s it cemented the image of the trousered woman. Worn by Jean Harlow and Marlene Dietrich, painted by Raoul Dufy and immortalized in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night, pajamas came to symbolise much more than sleepwear: this book explores how much the pajama phenomenon was not only critical to the careers of designers such as Chanel, Patou, Poiret, and Schiaparelli, but how the versatile garment was also bound to the independence of women and influenced culture more broadly. Through meticulous research and never-before-seen images, the authors position pajama fashion in the context of the Golden Age of Travel, the rise of Hollywood, and the changing political climate of the early 20th century, to reveal how the rising trend in sleepwear influenced the image of the trousered woman now associated with The American Look. In the period between the two world wars, pajamas transformed the fashion landscape. Emerging from ladies’ boudoirs in the late 1910s as a new outdoor mode, “beach pajamas” were among the first trousered women’s attire for public wear in the West. The popularity of pajamas at seaside resorts opened the door for other trousered apparel for women—from satin and lace ensembles to workwear-inspired denim jumpsuits— to be marketed under the “pajama” umbrella, ultimately familiarizing the public with the image of women in pants. By the late 1930s beach pajamas had been immortalized by the likes of Raul Dufy and F. Scott Fitzgerald and graced the covers of Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, and the New Yorker. With examples from the interwar period’s most influential designers, including Coco Chanel, Elsa Schiaparelli, and Madeleine Vionnet, as well as previously unpublished images from period photographs, private holdings, and museum collections, this is the first book to trace beach pajamas from their earliest appearances as anti-fashion garments at the close of the 1910s, to fanciful, feminine iterations of the 1920s and 1930s, to their evolution into the height of sportswear. From Sleepwear to Sportswear frames beach pajamas as liminal garments that straddle the lines between masculine and feminine, East and West, public and private, and sportswear and lingerie. Using context from the golden age of travel, the Hollywood film industry, the Great Depression, and a growing modernist zeitgeist, D’Agati and Schiff present new research to establish beach pajamas as an important foundation of American sportswear.