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Offers the first edited collection with an explicit documentary focus on fashion icons, events, cultures and industriesInvestigates the bearings of the documentary image and its visual politics in relation to fashionPushes forward new understandings of how different media and platforms, such as documentary feature films, television factual programmes, online videos, fashion exhibitions, edutainment and industrial films, interrogate ‘the real’ in relation to fashionConsiders a wide range of both contemporary and historical case studies, including analysis of fashion documentaries, fashion-series on television and online videos, including Queer Eye (2018), Follow Me (2017), Bill Cunningham New York (2010), and McQueen (2018)Includes two expanding interviews, one with Alexandra Palmer, senior fashion curator at Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, and one with Lorna Tucker, director of Westwood: Punk, Icon, Activists (2018)Feuds within fashion houses, megalomaniacs and photoshoot nightmares – fashion and drama have been a perfect match for decades. Over the past ten years, we have witnessed a boom of documentaries about fashion magazine editors, fashion and media politics and the history of fashion houses.How and why did fashion documentaries and non-fiction media become so popular? Documenting Fashion explores and reassesses the role of documentary media by tracing its history in shaping our understanding of fashion across multiple platforms and different national contexts, including industrial films, newsreels, TV shows, documentary films, digital media and photography. The essays in this collection underpin and profile a scholarly space in which a dialogue between fashion and documentary studies can evolve by drawing from different methodologies and approaches, such as media and cultural studies, ethnography, archival and museum studies, gender studies, marketing and public relations.

Celebrities in mass media --- Documentary films --- Fashion in motion pictures --- History and criticism

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Since embarking on economic reforms in 1978, the People’s Republic of China has also undergone a sweeping cultural reorganization, from proletarian culture under Mao to middle-class consumer culture today. Under these circumstances, how has a Chinese middle class come into being, and how has consumerism become the dominant ideology of an avowedly socialist country? The Art of Useless offers an innovative way to understand China’s unprecedented political-economic, social, and cultural transformations, showing how consumer culture helps anticipate, produce, and shape a new middle-class subjectivity.Examining changing representations of the production and consumption of fashion in documentaries and films, Calvin Hui traces how culture contributes to China’s changing social relations through the cultivation of new identities and sensibilities. He explores the commodity chain of fashion on a transnational scale, from production to consumption to disposal, as well as media portrayals of the intersections of clothing with class, gender, and ethnicity. Hui illuminates key cinematic narratives, such as a factory worker’s desire for a high-quality suit in the 1960s, an intellectual’s longing for fashionable clothes in the 1980s, and a white-collar woman’s craving for brand-name commodities in the 2000s. He considers how documentary films depict the undersides of consumption—exploited laborers who fantasize about the products they manufacture as well as the accumulation of waste and its disposal—revealing how global capitalism renders migrant factory workers, scavengers, and garbage invisible.A highly interdisciplinary work that combines theoretical nuance with masterful close analyses, The Art of Useless is an innovative rethinking of the emergence of China’s middle-class consumer culture.

Consumption (Economics) --- Fashion --- Fashion in motion pictures. --- Consumption (Economics) in motion pictures. --- Documentary films --- Middle class --- Middle class in motion pictures. --- Social aspects --- History and criticism. --- China --- Economic conditions