New York, Paris, London, Milan, Tokyo. This familiar list of cities conjures up the image of high fashion.

This book examines the powerful relationship between metropolitan modernity and fashion culture. The authors look at the significance of certain key sites in fashion's world order and at transformations in the connections between key cities. The status of fashion capital has now become a goal for urban boosters and planners, part of the wider promotion of the 'cultural economy' of major cities. In a rapidly changing global fashion system, new centres like Shanghai are making claims to join the ranks of Fashion's World Cities.

In chapters ranging from Los Angeles to Moscow and Dakar to Mumbai, Fashion's World Cities explores the relationship between major metropolises and the production, consumption and mythologizing of fashion.

About the Authors/Editors

David Gilbert is Professor of Geography at Royal Holloway University, London.
Christopher Breward is Deputy Head of Research at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London.

Contents

Part One: Fashion's World Cities: urban modernity and urban orders

* From Paris to Shanghai: the changing geographies of fashion's world cities
David Gilbert, Royal Holloway, University of London

* Urbane Fashion: Fashionability and the city
Elizabeth Wilson, University of the Arts, London

Part Two: Fashion's World Cities: styles and representations

* Paris, Capitale de la Mode: Representing the fashion city in the media
Agnes Rocamora, London College of Fashion

* Placing Tokyo on the Fashion Map: From catwalk to streetstyle
Yuniya Kawamura, Fashion Institute of Technology, New York

* Curating the Fashion City: New York style at the VA
Sonnet Stanfill, Victoria and Albert Museum, London

* Creating the Fashion City on Film 1953-1961
Pamela Church Gibson, London College of Fashion

Part Three: Fashion's World Cities: refabricating the urban order

* Milan, the city of pret porter: From Italian style to 'Made in Milan'
Simona Segre Reinach, Fashion Studies, IULM University, Milan

* How New York Stole Modern Fashion
Norma Rantisi, Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec

* Mapping Moscow Fashion: Spaces and spectacles of consumption
Olga Vainshtein, Russian State University for the Humanities

* Shaping the Shopping City: Master plans and pipe dreams in London's West End 1945-1979
Bronwen Edwards Royal Holloway, University of London

Part Four: Fashion's World Cities: Transnational Networks

* La Mode Dakaroise: Elegance, transnationalism and an African fashion capital
Hudita Nura Mustafa, Sarah Lawrence College (NY)

* Far Out and Way In: London as fashion cosmopolis, 1945-1979
Sonia Ashmore, London College of Fashion

* Fabrications of India: Transnational networks and the making of 'East/West' fashion
Claire Dwyer, University College London

* Sewing Machines and Dream Machines: Los Angeles and San Francisco as global fashion cities
Susan Kaiser Leslie W. Rabine, University of California, Davis