- Paperback: 384 pages
- Publisher: Penguin; 2nd ed edition (2002)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0141391146
- ISBN-13: 978-0141391144
- Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 5,549,582 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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More About the Author
Product Description
Product Description
From corsets to codpieces, stockings to stilettos and piercing to push-up bras, fashion and sex have always enjoyed a very close relationship. This new edition of David Kunzle's rich and revealing history of corsetry and body sculpture shows how this neglected phenomenon is closely bound up with sexual self-expression. Drawing on sources as diverse as medical literature and popular magazine articles, this fascinating history shows how in many ways the use of the corset rejected the role of the passive, maternal woman - so that in Victorian times it was actually seen by many as a scandalous threat to the social order. Even today fashion designers recognize its subversive powers, as a symbol of eroticism, decadence and control. Taking in other curiosities such as ancient body decoration, male corsetry, masochism and foot fetishism, this is an often racy journey into the enigma of all those who sculpt the shape of their desires onto their bodies.
--This text refers to an alternate
Paperback
edition.
About the Author
David Kunzle is Professor of Art History at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of The Early Comic Strip, Posters of Protest and Che Guevara: Icon, Myth and Message. He is British-born and returns regularly to this country.
--This text refers to an alternate
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
This book is a very detailed analysis of the forms of body sculpture, with both historical and contemporary references. However, if you are looking for visual references (if you are a corset maker, for example) these are limited to small black and white photos which are not particularly helpful. If you are a student wishing to study the subject in depth (for a thesis, for example), this would be a very useful point of reference and I would recommend the book on that basis.
7 of 8 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This is a very informative and well researched, but nevertheless easy to read account of how fashions have changed through the centuries. The particular focus is on corsets and corsetry, but shoes, high collars and lingerie are also featured. There are many illustrations, from witty Bateman like cartoons from famous magazines of a particular era (e.g. Punch, Englishwomen's Domestic Magazine), contemporary fashion shoots and historical costumery. Also features the extremisism of fetishists, such as 15, inch tightlacers Cathy Jung, Ethel Granger and aptly named "Spook"! A terrific read for costume lovers everywhere.
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
David Kunzle is the doyen of corset-related academic research and analysis. To be honest, after 40 years of interest and publication in the subject, he does not adopt a high academic stance and is all the more readable as a result. His recourse to psychology is commonsensical and not at all highfalutin. His own excitement with corseting and other forms of body modification are quite apparent. Just because he is an academic, with a good publication record in various fields, that does not mean he tries to hide his own fascination; his fixation even.
This is the second edition of a text which I read first in about 1991. It is not very different although it includes more annexes and notes. His use of contemporary personal corseting histories is one of the fascinations of the book, although it is not very well illustrated in support. Adequately, but not very.
It would have been easy to make this text salacious and scandalous, to increase sales. But Kunzle did not do that. You will not find much about Dita von Teese, Lady Gaga, Madonna or other high celeb corset-wearers. However, you will find many accounts of figure training and body modification by ordinary women [and a few men] through their obsessional wearing of tightlaced corsets, often 24/7. One or two of the accounts, maybe more, are overtly erotic and add a little frisson to the generally explanatory and detached approach he tries to adopt; not always successfully, thankfully.
As you would expect from his academic title, there is treatment also of foundation fashions from about 1900 to the late 1960, when they practically disappeared. He presents corsetry as a cyclical fashion form, which is coming back into vogue; but was always in style at the outer fringes of erotic couture.
Interesting book; well written; could do with more illustrations to back up the human stories; but worth buying and reading.
This is the second edition of a text which I read first in about 1991. It is not very different although it includes more annexes and notes. His use of contemporary personal corseting histories is one of the fascinations of the book, although it is not very well illustrated in support. Adequately, but not very.
It would have been easy to make this text salacious and scandalous, to increase sales. But Kunzle did not do that. You will not find much about Dita von Teese, Lady Gaga, Madonna or other high celeb corset-wearers. However, you will find many accounts of figure training and body modification by ordinary women [and a few men] through their obsessional wearing of tightlaced corsets, often 24/7. One or two of the accounts, maybe more, are overtly erotic and add a little frisson to the generally explanatory and detached approach he tries to adopt; not always successfully, thankfully.
As you would expect from his academic title, there is treatment also of foundation fashions from about 1900 to the late 1960, when they practically disappeared. He presents corsetry as a cyclical fashion form, which is coming back into vogue; but was always in style at the outer fringes of erotic couture.
Interesting book; well written; could do with more illustrations to back up the human stories; but worth buying and reading.
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