05 Clothing Design/Fabrication/Illustration

05.3 Fabrication/Assembly Construction

Roach-Higgins (1995). Dress and identity. New York: Fairchild. ISBN: 1-56367-057-7.

Reviewed by Usha Chowdhary, U. of Missouri

The book of readings by Roach-Higgins, Eicher, and Johnson does an excellent job of interlacing social and cultural aspects of clothing for understanding dress and human behavior. Pedagogically, it is a well-organized compendium of 62 articles organized in five parts: basic ideas, individual's identity and dress, developmental role of culture through dress on formation of individual identity, and the revelation of bipolar forces of stability and change through dress over time and space.
The organization further includes twenty-one subsections with one to six articles under each section. The compendium has articles from thirteen cultures and five special needs. Good questions are raised for each of the five parts in the preface section, and thought-provoking introductions are provided for each of the five parts of the anthology. The annotated bibliography provided by Jane Hegland for the selected articles is a good addition. The instructor's guide has some good suggestions regarding course outlines, activities and possible essay questions.
From a temporal standpoint, the distribution of article selection includes years from 1940-1995. A majority of the selections are made from books, journals, and magazines. Overall, the selected reading reflects good integration of the sociocultural aspects of clothing with some strokes of psychological elements as inherent character of the content. Besides the information on the United States, African-American, Amish, Bedouin, Cosmopolitan, English, European, French, Japanese, Kalabari, Nigerian, and Swedish cultures and subcultures are represented in the collection. The readings represent six decades with over three-fourths of the compiled articles from the 1980's and 1990's. Diversity as a societal issue is represented through variations in time, cultures, and sources of information within the context of dress and human behavior. In my opinion, this collection also contributes toward filling the void that exists in the recent textbooks in the area of dress and human behavior by strengthening the content on the cultural aspects. The book can be used as the sole text or one of the texts for a course in the sociocultural aspects of dress.