By Jutta Seibert

Bloomsbury Fashion Central (BFC) is a platform that features a range of interdisciplinary research resources on dress and textile culture. Available through BFC are the Berg Fashion Library, the Fairchild Books Library, Bloomsbury Fashion Business Cases, and archives of fashion photography and video. Campus-wide access to BFC is available on trial basis until Oct. 23 through the Databases A-Z list on the Library’s website.

While BFC was clearly created with fashion professionals in mind, books in the Berg Fashion Library have a broad multi-disciplinary appeal and cover all aspects of dress and fashion worldwide. The Library’s collection already includes a small selection of print books from the Berg Fashion Library among them the Berg Companion to Fashion and The Dictionary of Fashion History.

Another noteworthy title in this award-winning library is a new edition of Peter McNeil’s collection of essays on fashion by a wide swath of critical thinkers among them Roland Barthes, Pierre Bourdieu, Fernand Braudel, Johan Huizinga, Georg Simmel, and Thorstein Veblen. Originally published as Fashion: Critical and Primary Sources, the new edition is called Classic and Modern Writings on Fashion. Michelle Maskiell’s “Consuming Kashmir: Shawls and Empires, 1500–2000” is one of the essays in this collection that reveals the intricate connections between fashion and daily life, politics, and economics. Also included is the multi-volume Berg Encyclopedia of World Dress and Fashion which explores all aspects of dress and fashion on a global level.

Take a closer look at some of the works featured in this collection and let us know what you think. Here are a few titles to get you started:

• Suthrell, Charlotte A. Unzipping Gender: Sex, Cross-Dressing and Culture. Oxford: Berg, 2004.
• Winge, Theresa M. Costuming Cosplay: Dressing the Imagination. London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2019.
• Summers, Leigh. Bound to Please: A History of the Victorian Corset. Oxford: Berg, 2001.
• Craik, Jennifer. Uniforms Exposed: From Conformity to Transgression. Oxford: Berg, 2005.
• Griggs, Claudine. S/He: Changing Sex and Changing Clothes. Oxford: Berg, 1998.
• Arthur, Linda B. Religion, Dress and the Body. Oxford: Berg, 1999.
• El Guindi, Fadwa. Veil: Modesty, Privacy and Resistance. Oxford: Berg, 1999.
• McVeigh, Brian J. Wearing Ideology: State, Schooling and Self-Presentation in Japan. Oxford: Berg, 2000.

BFC also includes lesson plans and bibliographic subject guides on a range of topics such as fashion and art, the social psychology of dress, and fashion and gender contributed by subject experts. Each object has its own doi to facilitate content sharing and integration in the online classroom. Contact us if you have questions.

Jutta Seibert is Director of Research Services & Scholarly Engagement at Falvey Memorial Library.