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How does a country dress itself? From Montreal's ‘Retail Mile,’ to Ontario's millinery trade, to how war and television can effect the garment industry or whether tailoring can make a cultural impact, Alexandra Palmer gathers together some of the top curators, designers, fashion writers, historians, and artists in the country to create a truly dynamic and thought-provoking collection of essays.
Controversial and unconventional, Fashion: A Canadian Perspective challenges readers to consider aspects of Canadian identity in terms of what its citizenship has chosen to wear for the last three centuries, and the internal and external influences of those socio-cultural decisions. Covering a broad range of topics — such as the iconic Hudson Bay Blanket Coats, garment factories of the late 1800s, specific Canadian fashion couturiers whose influences reach international stages, and the contemporary role of fashion journalists and their effect on trends — this collection breaks new ground in producing multiple perspectives on fashion and fashion dress.
In a country that has given birth to such global fashion corporations as Club Monaco, Roots, and MAC, Fashion: A Canadian Perspective develops the first intriguing and readable historiography that links past to future, couture vision to trade trends, and heritage costuming to FashionTelevision.
Controversial and unconventional, this collection examines Canadian identity in terms of the fashion worn and designed over the last three centuries, and the internal and external influences of those socio-cultural decisions.
- Imprint: University of Toronto Press
- Published: October 2004
- Pages: 406
Alexandra Palmer is the fashion and costume curator at the Royal Ontario Museum and an adjunct professor in the graduate program in art history at York University and the art history department at the University of Toronto.
‘This book is important, timely, and immensely relevant. Alexandra Palmer has put together a rich and varied collection that will contribute to Canadian cultural history and undoubtedly initiate further projects and debates. The content of each essay is excellent and the collection is outstanding in its complementary diversity. It moves this rapidly expanding and exciting field into the area of Canadian Studies, to which it contributes as significantly as it does to the study of dress and fashion, media studies, cultural history, and the history of consumption.’
Janice Helland, Department of Art and Department of Women's Studies, Queen's University
Chapters
PDF List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Fashion and Identity
‘Very Picturesque and Very Canadian’: The Blanket Coat and Anglo-Canadian Identity in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century
Dressing Up: A Consuming Passion
Defrocking Dad: Masculinity and Dress in Montreal, 1700–1867
The Association of Canadian Couturiers
Fashion, Trade, and Consumption
Shop and Factory: The Ontario Millinery Trade in Transition, 1870–1930
‘The Work Being Chiefly Performed by Women’: Female Workers in the Garment Industry in Saint John, New Brunswick, in 1871
Three Thousand Stitches: The Development of the Clothing Industry in Nineteenth-Century Halifax
Enduring Roots: Gibb and Co. and the Nineteenth-Century Tailoring Trade in Montreal
Montreal’s Fashion Mile: St Catherine Street, 1890–1930
Fashion and Transition
Dress Reform in Nineteenth-Century Canada
Fashion and War in Canada, 1939–1945
Fashion and Refuge: The Jean Harris Salon, Montreal, 1941–1961
Fashion and Journalism
Laced In and Let Down: Women’s Fashion Features in the Toronto Daily Press, 1890–1900
The Fashion of Writing, 1985–2000: Fashion-Themed Television’s Impact on the Canadian Fashion Press
A Little on the Wild Side: Eaton’s Prestige Fashion Advertising Published in the Montreal Gazette, 1952–1972
Contributors
Index