Fashion is often confined to the realm of appearance and frivolousness instead of being understood as a complex system involving creativity, business acumen, culture, communication and training. The fashion system changes very quickly: it must adapt to new markets and a variety of needs, but at the same time it has to cultivate capabilities and sensitivities allowing it to render its products extraordinary and desirable. This book skilfully describes the intense complexity of fashion: its history, its culture, its relationship with time, its role in redefining gender and identity, global tendencies in luxury, novel forms of clothing democratization, new professions in fashion (interpreted as a cultural system in which the boundaries between publishing, curating and museum management are increasingly less defined), fashion as in industrial system, and fashion as a theory of styles.

Maria Luisa Frisa, a fashion curator, co-ordinates the degree programme in Fashion Design and Multimedia Arts at the IUAV University of Venice and is president of the Italian Association of Fashion Studies (MISA).