Praise for the Berg Fashion Library from the Library and Academic Communities – from Across the Disciplines
"In this age of reliance on search engines for research, the Berg taxonomy offers a refreshingly direct means of accessing the increasingly diverse range of literature on clothing and dress. This tool will aid individuals with general, specialized, and visual study needs.”
Paula A. Baxter, Curator, Art & Architecture Collection, The New York Public Library
"The study of fashion is important to curators, museums and scholars because it gets to the heart of society. The Berg Fashion Library provides an accessible and essential online resource that draws together important dress collections and individual garments, accompanied by a rich array of images; this resource is indispensable."
Claire Wilcox, Senior Curator, Department of Furniture, Textiles & Fashion, V&A Museum
“This is a really worthwhile project. It will be useful for students at many levels of costume/dress/fashion studies. It is not intimidating and has the potential to expand and is flexible which is invaluable for a resource like this.”
Valerie Cumming, Chairman, The Costume Society, and formerly Deputy Director and Chief Curator, Museum of London
“At last, coming from a department that has just launched an MA in Digital Anthropology, we couldn’t be happier to see this hugely important resource being made available online. The reputation of Berg for all aspects of clothing, fashion and more general material culture studies is firmly established throughout the world. With the launch of the Berg Fashion Library, this is being taken to a new level – the level of everyone’s laptop. The Berg Fashion Library’s accessibility creates the sort of potential for interactivity in the future that we have been also trying to develop with The Global Denim Project. It is a real boon to students, and hopefully pretty much everyone interested in clothing and fashion will soon be on board.”
Daniel Miller, Professor of Material Culture, University College London
“Fashion studies is a branch of cultural research that crosses boundaries. Sociologists and cultural historians are today far more sensitive than they used to be to the meaning and significance of clothing of all kinds, whether fashion, anti-fashion, counter cultural fashion or 'outside' fashion (if any clothing is). 'Fashion' therefore includes ethnographic study, the sociological study of sub-cultures, historical investigations and aesthetics.”
Elizabeth Wilson, Department of Applied Social Sciences, London Metropolitan University and author of Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity
“The academic study of dress and fashion history in the United Kingdom has its roots in the discipline of Art History, and this close connection has remained fundamental to its development over the last forty years. The Berg Fashion Library will, I have no doubt, prove to be a vital resource for art and dress historians, collating visual information from varied sources and enhancing this with a rich variety of contextual and analytical essays.”
Rebecca Arnold, Oak Foundation Lecturer in History of Dress and Textiles, Courtauld Institute of Art
“As a scholar and teacher of literature, women’s studies and cultural studies, I find fashion texts indispensable to the full range of my research projects and courses. Fashion studies, as the books from Berg demonstrate, is a model for interdisciplinary scholarship. Fashion itself is a major force in the historical construction and transformation of gender and sexuality, in cultures all over the world. For literature, I’ve found helpful many Berg fashion books, not only those concerned directly with literature, but also those that examine the semiotics and symbolism of fashion.”
Leslie W. Rabine, University of California, Davis
“The study of fashion (or dress) speaks to key research fields within human geography, including the body, corporeality, consumption, commodity chains and retailing. The BFL will be a key resource for researchers and graduate students in the field.”
Nicky Gregson, Professor, Department of Geography, University of Sheffield
Click here to see the board of experts on the Berg Fashion Library's academic and library advisory panels.