Gertrud Lehnert Book order

The focus of «Fusion Fashion» is on Orientalism as a sartorial practice, which has to be differentiated from the common knowledge of Orientalism by means of its organization, constitution and reception. The book offers historic as well as systematic perspectives. On the one hand, it compares orientalizing practices in fashion since the Tang Period in China and European Renaissance. On the other hand, it highlights current tendencies of so called «orientalism», «self-orientalism», «occidentalism» in a globalized world. The book covers two time periods: Orientalized fashion practices from the 16th to the beginning of the 20th century, with an emphasis on European «Oriental» practices, and the period beginning in the 1990s up to the present day, with an emphasis on non-Western sartorial practices.

In the last decade, the so called «spatial turn» has produced a broad discussion of space and spatiality in the social sciences, in architecture and art, as well as in philosophy, and also in literary criticism. The book focuses on one aspect largely ignored by literary historians as well as by theorists/historians of space, that is, the constitutive interrelationship of space and emotions. Departing from a dynamic concept of space as the result of human activities and perceptions, combined with the phenomenological concept of space possessing a specific atmosphere, we wish to initiate a discussion of the specific emotional and atmospheric qualities of «heterotopias» in the Foucaultian sense, or « non-lieux » as described by Marc Augé.

Looks at the history of fashion from prehistoric times to the present, and discusses critical personalities, trends, and important influences on fashion