The Cambridge Global History of Fashion: Volume 1

Explores how the long history of fashion from antiquity to c. 1800 created global networks and animated world communities.

Volume I sheds light on the globalising forces that shaped the long history of fashion, and how they significantly impacted economic, social, and cultural change from antiquity up until c. 1800. An interdisciplinary volume that draws on history, art, economics and museum studies.Volume I surveys the long history of fashion from the ancient world to c. 1800. The volume seeks to answer fundamental questions on the origins of fashion, challenging Eurocentric explanations that the emergence of fashion was a European phenomenon and shows instead that fashion found early expressions across the globe well before the age of European colonialism and imperialism. It sheds light on how fashion was experienced in a multitude of ways depending on class, gender, and race, and despite geographical distance, fashion connected populations across the globe. Fashions flowered and were reseeded, through entanglements of empire, forced and voluntary migration, evolving racial systems, burgeoning sea travel and transcontinental systems.