Reference Reviews

Doug’s Student Reference Room

The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Clothing through World History, edited by Jill Condra. 3 vols. 1.086 p. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2008. 978-0-313-33662-1. $399.95.

One of the most popular strands of research among high school students is the fashion of an era. The allure surely has something to do with adolescents finding their own fashion sense, raising questions about how their own identity connects to their outward appearance and extending these same questions to the world outside themselves. As the preface to this collection suggests, people throughout history have worn clothes for the same reasons; the form that the clothing takes, however, may tell us much about a society’s geographic limits and possibilities, its values, political ideals, religious beliefs and economic practices. This three volume set offers 27 essays describing fashions from prehistory to the 21st century. The first volume includes essays on prehistoric clothing, Egyptian, Persian, Greek, Etruscan and Roman, Byzantine and medieval clothing. Volume two offers essays spanning the years 1500-1800 A.D., including entries on fashion in Renaissance Italy and Northern Europe, the seventeenth and eighteenth century—predominantly in Europe— and the North American colonies. Three essays in this volume describe clothing beyond the Western world in Edo Japan, Mughal India and Korea. The last volume examines fashions of the past two hundred years, again, predominantly in the Western world. A single chapter spans the nineteenth century, followed by ten chapters that trace fashion trends decade by decade. There is not a specific format followed for the essays, but most connect fashion and clothing to broader cultural, economic, political and social developments, making this a useful supplement for upper grade high school social studies and English classes. A preface, a glossary and a comprehensive index are repeated in each volume. The glaring weakness of this encyclopedia is its lack of illustrations. Each volume includes a center insert of just eight pages of color photos and a smattering of black and white photos interspersed with the text. However, the quality of that text in terms of the connections made between clothing and broader historical issues earns this a recommendation as a secondary purchase for high school and public libraries.
—Doug Achterman