If there is any flaw with this half of the book, it is that the art made in response to these new developments in film and theatre is rarely discussed or illustrated. It is at this time that the reader discovers there is no exhibition checklist anywhere in the book. This is a mixed blessing. On the one hand, it allows the book to func- tion beyond the confines of the artworks included in the associated exhibition, which could never hope to be truly complete. Further study and analysis beyond the works in the exhibition is therefore encouraged. On the other hand, the absence of an exhibition checklist deprives the reader of sound, readily available examples of what the authors are discussing. The rest of the book takes a different approach, which mostly compensates for the lack of examples in the earlier chapters. These later chapters are devoted to the exploration of early cinema, vaudeville and burlesque in the work of John Sloan, Everett Shinn, Edward Hopper and Charles Demuth, pioneering Ameri- can modernists whose imaginations were captivated by these new forms of popular entertainment. Some of these chapters are more original than others in their visual analysis and themes of exploration. It is hardly surprising that in his occasional depictions of theatres, Hopper discovered the same loneliness and introspection that he found everywhere. Sylvia Yount's essay on Shinn, the Ash-Can artist most often associated with scenes of the theatre, is an articulate, insightful study of how care- fully he developed his style to convey his perceptions of the character of modern popular entertainment in ways indebted to, yet different from, earlier French Impressionists such as Degas. Shinn manipulated composition, colour, paint handling and viewpoints to explore the complex relationships between the audi- ence and the entertainers and to convey the experience of theatricality and spectacle. The tenth and final chapter of the book, `The company of ghosts' by Walter Murch, is an oddly nostalgic speculation on the future of film at the dawn of the Digital Age. Since the historical scope of this exhibition catalogue ends about 60 years ago, and video and installation art of the 1960s and later are not included, this chapter seems out-of-place as the con- clusion to an otherwise enlightening book. Although this final essay is not particularly helpful, the book is otherwise very worthwhile reading and will prove useful to Americanists. herb b hartel John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY AGAINST FASHION: CLOTHING AS ART 1850±1930 radu stern MIT Press 2004 £27.95 $42.00 205 pp. 46 col/84 mono illus isbn 0-262-19403-7 FASHION AT THE EDGE: SPECTACLE, MODERNITY AND DEATHLINESS caroline evans Yale University Press 2003 £30.00 $50.00 326 pp. 100 col/100 mono illus isbn 0-300-10192-9 T he problems of how to understand the cultural meaning of fashion and of where to locate it between the complexes of art and commerce remain open to a wide field of debate and these two books neatly locate two interestingly different positions. Stern is concerned with a specifically defined historical move- ment and Evans is grappling with the task of unravelling the meanings of contem- porary issues. Stern's title, Against Fashion, is helpfully direct. It focuses on the movement that strides the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that was convinced of the need to do battle with fashion, for a variety of reasons whether moral or aesthetic. This battle was most vehemently waged against fashions for women, since men's dress was in general understood to have undergone a process of evolutionary rationalisation, although there was full scope for some campaigners to argue against the dull conformity of this bourgeois ideal. Following the briefest of introductions, Stern gives us a concen- trated study of different locations of this anti-fashion tendency spanning the period from the British Dress Reform movement to Sonia Delaunay, including sections devoted to Henry van de Velde, the Wiener WerkstaÈtte, Futurism and the Russian avant-garde. More than half the book com- prises a useful anthology of texts repre- senting the campaigners under review. The illustrations are in most cases confined to paper projects, a fact which underlines the infrequency with which these often- utopian proposals were actually carried through to production. Not only did the radical designs of artists and architects fail to capture widespread consumer appeal, they were usually conceived with a blithe ignorance of dressmaking techniques. William Morris is introduced early in this survey and remains the most articulate representative of the idealistic attack on fashion: The very capitalists know well that there is no genuine, healthy demand for them [fashions] . . . fashion ± a strange monster born of the vacancy of rich people. The battle was entered upon largely from two positions: on the one hand, a concern with feminism, comfort and hygiene and, on the other, considerations that were substantially artistic. There was a poten- tially felicitous convergence of interest between these factions in the adaptation of medieval or classical dress ± tendencies encouraged by Pre-Raphaelite and Grecian subjects in Victorian painting. It is curious to notice the centrality of architects in this debate, van de Velde, Hoffmann and Frank Lloyd Wright, for example, arguing for reform on the grounds of needing to control the total aesthetic of the modern home, apparently seeing women's dress as an element of domestic decoration. While most of these reformers were concerned to halt fashion in its tracks and replace its incessant seasonal shifts with a model of an unchanging ideal of good design, the Futurists were in some conceptual difficulty here since they were enthusiastic about the dynamism of modern life and metropolitan energy. Artists such as Balla, Depero and Thayaht took on the most challenging role of seeking to readmit colour and pattern and of introducing radical asymmetry into men's dress. A counter-position was repre- sented by those whose principal complaint against fashion was its contribution to social privilege and who therefore saw only the benefits of an undifferentiated, rational sobriety in dress forms in helping to secure a democratic society. The anthology of texts announces that period of history when ideological certain- ties could be contested with conviction. Dress was an important element in the task of achieving the betterment of society and fashion was readily demonised as representing the immoral seduction of material excess and social privilege enacted by capitalism against women, who had little power to resist. Reviews 32 The Art Book volume 11 issue 3 june 2004 ß bpl/aah