Contact details

The Courtauld Institute of Art

Somerset House

Strand, London

WC2R 0RN

 

rebecca.arnold@courtauld.ac.uk

Rebecca Arnold was educated at King’s College, London (BA Hons History, 1990), The Courtauld Institute of Art (MA History of Dress, 1993) and University College, London (PhD, 2006).    Before joining The Courtauld Institute of Art in 2009, she was a Research Fellow and Lecturer in the History of Design Department at the Royal College of Art and a Visiting Fellow at the Victoria & Albert Museum. In 2006, she was the first Guest Professor at the Centre for Fashion Studies at Stockholm University.  In 2001, she set up and ran the BA (Hons) Fashion History and Theory at Central Saint Martin’s College of Art and Design. 


Current Research/Interests


Her current research focuses on the development of ready-to-wear fashion in the twentieth century, and will culminate in a book, Readymade: Fashion for Everyone in New York and London (Bard Graduate Center/Yale University Press) and an exhibition to be held in London and New York in 2013.  She is also working on two articles: ‘Wife Dressing: Designing Femininity in 1950s New York,’ and ‘The New Rococo: Sofia Coppola and Contemporary Fashions in Femininity.’


Courses taught during the forthcoming academic year


Topic course: Sensory Encounters with Dress and Textiles
Period course: Dress and Identity in Twentieth-century Britain
Texts and Contexts course: Re-presenting the Past: Uses of History in Dress, Fashion and Art

MA: Dress, Body, Space and Modernity: Fashion in the City, 1919-1939 (forthcoming 2010/11)

 

Recent publications


Books
Fashion: A Very Short Introduction, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009)

The American Look: Sportswear, Fashion & the Image of Women in 1930s and
1940s New York, (London & New York: I.B.Tauris/Palgrave, 2009)

Fashion, Desire & Anxiety: Image & Morality in the 20th Century, (London & New Brunswick: I.B.Tauris/Rutgers University Press, 2001, 2nd edition 2009)

Essays
‘Vionnet and Classicism,’ in Fashion: Critical & Primary Sources, Peter McNeill,
ed., (London & New York: Berg, 2008)

‘Movement and Modernity: New York Sportswear, Dance and Exercise in the 1930s and 1940s,’ in Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture, (September 2008)

‘ “Sometimes the Truth is Wicked:” Fashion, Violence and Obsession in Leave Her to Heaven,’ with Adrian Garvey, in Marketa Uhlirova, ed., If Looks Could Kill: Cinematic Images of Fashion and Violence, (London: Koenig/Fashion in Film Festival, 2008)

‘Fashion & Politics,’ SHOWstudio.com (2008)

‘Modern Fashions for Modern Women: The Evolution of New York Sportswear in
the 1930s,’ Costume, (June 2007)

‘Madeleine Vionnet: A Case Study,’ in Bernardo Valli, Patrizia Calefato & Benedetta Barzini, eds., Dress & Ethics: Proceedings of the ‘Dress & Ethics’ conference, University of Urbino, (Rome: Littore, 2003) 
 
‘Looking American: The Photography of Louise Dahl Wolfe’, in Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture, (Mar 2002 & in Brazilian edition March 2003)

‘Vivienne Westwood’s Anglomania’, in Christopher Breward, Becky Conekin & Caroline Cox, eds., The Englishness of English Dress, ed., (New York & Oxford: Berg, 2002)