The phenomenon of fashion interests me from a scientific point of view. Can anyone point me to interesting books or papers about it?
Please note I am not looking for stuff telling me the latest trends. I am looking for info about:
[ol][li]The psychology of fashion[]How things become fashionable organically[]How things become fashionable commercially[]Possibly some fun histories/autobiographies of people who’ve known it’s all bollocks[]Miscellaneous surprising results[/li]
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I’d start with college textbooks for those who go to fashion school. I went to the Fashion Institute of Technology and the psychology of fashion was discussed in many of my classes- I’d look for a book that covers the foundations as well as books about fashion marketing. Two, three and possible five would also be found in introductory text books. Not really sure if you’d find number four anywhere.
His lastnames happen to be quite common and a lot of his work is in Spanish, but if you can find any works by one Luis Ángel Abad Morales (not the poetry volumes), his PhD and most of his later publications focus on the aesthetics of rock - how they developed, their roots, trends pushed commercially vs others that as far as he can tell were spontaneous, etc. In Google Scholar he seems to appear most often as LA Abad.
It’s on a type of fashion and is wider than what most people think of as “fashion” - but it’s linked. He’s published both in scholarly journals on art and in music magazines including Rolling Stone (although this may have been the Spanish editions only).