By Jutta Seibert

Fashion touches our lives in ways small and large. It is an outlet for creative expression and an instrument of compliance. Fashion and design shape the mundane and elevate the holy and extraordinary. Just think about the conspicuous vestments worn to celebrate mass or the extraordinary garments we choose to celebrate special milestones in our lives.

The Berg Fashion Library (BFL) is a testament to fashion’s ubiquitous influence. The collection features a wide range of multidisciplinary monographs and essays that touch on all aspects of dress and fashion worldwide. Titles that discuss the constraints of fashion include Craik’s Uniforms Exposed: From Conformity to Transgression (Berg, 2005) and Tynan and Godson’s Uniform: Clothing and Discipline in the Modern World (Bloomsbury, 2019). Hume’s The Religious Life of Dress: Global Fashion and Faith (Bloomsbury, 2013) explores the role of religious apparel. In Wedding Dress Across Cultures (Berg, 2013) Foster and Johnson present a rich collection of essays on the role of wedding garments worldwide. Recently added titles include Turney’s Fashion Crimes: Dressing for Deviance (Bloomsbury, 2020) and Turner’s The Sport Shoe: A History from Field to Fashion (Bloomsbury, 2019)

The Berg Encyclopedia of World Dress and Fashion is one of the cornerstones of the collection together with the second edition of Classic and Modern Writings on Fashion, a collection of seminal writings on fashion including influential thinkers such as Roland Barthes, Pierre Bourdieu, Fernand Braudel, Johan Huizinga, Georg Simmel, and Thorstein Veblen. A selection of carefully chosen images from museums and exhibits round out the collection together with lesson plans and bibliographic guides.

Remote access is provided through the Library’s Databases A-Z list under B.

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