Fashion Victims: The Dangers of Dress Past and Present

摘要

Twentieth and twenty-first century popular culture mainly associates a 'fashion victim' with a 'fashion don't', but Alison Matthews David's Fashion Victims: The Dangers of Dress Past and Present reminds us that a fashion victim can also be one who suffers physically by interacting with stylish garments and objects. In this thoroughly researched exploration of how fashion was created, employed, and used in sometimes toxic ways, Matthews David weaves a narrative that deepens the reader's understanding of an intriguing and macabre subject-how fashioning beauty during the nineteenth century could simultaneously harm those producing and wearing it. Chapters on germ-sweeping skirts, mercury-saturated hats, arsenic green hair ornaments, poisonous striped socks, blinding eyelash dye and combustible children's clothing, among others, make Fashion Victims an informative addition to nineteenth-century fashion studies for academics and historians as well as for those with only an amateur's interest in fashion history.