Vike Martina Plock

Bio: Vike Martina Plock is an academic researcher. The author has contributed to research in topics: Waltz & Modernity. The author has an hindex of 1, co-authored 1 publications receiving 6 citations.

"I just took it straight from Vogue": Fashion, Femininity, and Literary Modernity in Rosamond Lehmann's Invitation to the Waltz

Abstract: This article analyzes fashion as a discursive force in Rosamond Lehmann’s novel Invitation to the Waltz . Through a reading of Lehmann’s novel alongside fashion magazines, it demonstrates that 1920s fashion, in spite of its carefully stylized public image as harbinger of modernity, was complicit in propagating patriarchal norms. However, if Invitation opposes the cultural machinery that regulates gender roles in post-war Britain, its formal appearance is nonetheless dependent on the very same tenets it criticizes since the novel reveals resemblances to Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse . If the tension between imitation and originality determines choices in sartorial fashions, female authorship in the inter-war period, this essay argues, was subjected to the same market forces that controlled and sustained the organization of the fashion industry.

Fashion at the edge : spectacle, modernity and deathliness

Abstract: What do images of illness, vampirism, wounds, and addiction say about contemporary fashion? Contemporary experimental fashion has a dark side, a preoccupation with representations of death, trauma, alienation, and decay. This book looks closely at this strand of fashion design in the 1990s, exploring what its disturbing themes tell us about consumer culture and contemporary anxieties. Caroline Evans analyses the work of experimental designers, the images of fashion photographers, and the spectacular fashion shows that developed in the final decade of the 20th century to arrive at a new understanding of fashion's dark side and what it signifies. "Fashion at the Edge" considers a range of cutting-edge contemporary fashion in unprecedented depth and detail, including the work of such current designers as John Galliano, Alexander McQueen, Hussein Chalayan, and Viktor & Rolf. Contrasting images by photographers like Steven Meisel, Nick Knight, and Juergen Teller are also reviewed. Drawing on diverse perspectives from Marx to Walter Benjamin, Evans shows that fashion stands at the very centre of the contemporary, and that it voices some of Western culture's deepest concerns.

Better Travel Through Brand Names: The Couture Grand Tour in Paris Is a Woman's Town and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes

Abstract: This article identifies the way famous names mediated the relationship between US cultural insecurity and secure consumer behavior by reading Anita Loos’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes alongside US film branding and shopping guides to Europe. In Blondes , Loos establishes a new kind of value based on recognizable brand names such as Cartier and Ritz. Branding and franchising luxury goods resonated with a US desire to democratize high culture, with the effect of rewriting the grand tour narrative as a shopping expedition.

‘It is the Hat that Matters the Most’: Hats, Propriety and Fashion in British Fiction, 1890–1930

Abstract: Essential to both propriety and fashion, hats were a crucial aspect of British female dress and appearance in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This article shows how British novelists of this period, ranging from mainstream to experimental, understood this importance. With appropriate contextualization, these literary depictions can illuminate how women wore and felt about their hats. Authors such as Frances Hodgson Burnett, Dorothy Whipple and Virginia Woolf used these accessories to explore social respectability and convention, the pleasures and challenges of following fashion, and consumption strategies among women. Despite the era's significant social changes, remarkable continuity exists in these literary representations of hats.