Fashioning Horror - by Julia Petrov & Gudrun D Whitehead (Paperback)

About the Book

"From Jack the Ripper to Frankenstein, Halloween customs to Alexander McQueen collections, [this book] examines how terror is fashioned visually, symbolically, and materially through fashion and costume, in literature, film, and real life. With a series of case studies that range from sensationalist cinema and slasher films to true crime and nineteenth-century literature, the volume investigates the central importance of clothing to the horror genre, and broadens our understanding of both material and popular culture. Arguing that dress is fundamental to our understanding of character and setting within horror, the chapters also reveal how the grotesque and horrific is at the center of fashion itself, with its potential for instability, disguise, and carnivalesque subversion"--Back cover.

Book Synopsis

From Jack the Ripper to Frankenstein, Halloween customs to Alexander McQueen collections, Fashioning Horror examines how terror is fashioned visually, symbolically, and materially through fashion and costume, in literature, film, and real life.

With a series of case studies that range from sensationalist cinema and Slasher films to true crime and nineteenth-century literature, the volume investigates the central importance of clothing to the horror genre, and broadens our understanding of both material and popular culture. Arguing that dress is fundamental to our understanding of character and setting within horror, the chapters also reveal how the grotesque and horrific is at the center of fashion itself, with its potential for instability, disguise, and carnivalesque subversion.

Packed with original research, and bringing together a range of international scholars, the book is the first to thoroughly examine the aesthetics of terror and the role of fashion in the construction of horror.

Review Quotes

"Fashioning Horror: Dressing to Kill on Screen and in Literature offers an incredible source to investigate the intriguing
relationship between dress and horror as narrated in literature, cinema, and television." --The Journal of Dress History

"Fashioning Horror unlocks the chilling wardrobe of a grisly array of sartorially obsessed monsters, ghosts and killers. The essays skilfully analyse the fashionable signification of the undead, flesh-eaters, slashers and their prey; a dazzling cast of fashion victims from the twelfth century to the present day." --Jonathan Faiers, Professor of Fashion Thinking, Winchester School of Art, UK, and author of Dressing Dangerously: Dysfunctional Fashion in Film

"This book offers a worthwhile contribution to the highly apparent, but often overlooked, connection between fashion and horror. The authors in this collection pay great attention to the intricacies of fashion, costume and design across a range of horror genres. Most importantly, they explore the problems found in the link between materiality and genre itself." --Royce Mahawatte, Central St Martins, University of the Arts, London, UK

About the Author

Julia Petrov is Curator of Western Canadian History at the Royal Alberta Museum and Adjunct Lecturer at the University of Alberta, Canada. She is the co-editor of The Thing About Museums (2011) and Narrating Objects, Collecting Stories (2012).

Gudrun D. Whitehead is an assistant professor of museum studies at the University of Iceland in Reykjavík, Iceland. She is the Icelandic editor of the journal Nordisk Museologi and the lead editor of a forthcoming special edition of Museum and Society (2018).