Shows how the fashion industry in the mid- to late twentieth century created a particular way of seeing religion as fashionable From cross necklaces to fashion designs inspired by nuns’ habits, how have fashion sources interpreted Christianity? And how, in turn, have these interpretations shaped conceptions of religion in the United States? Religion in Vogue explores the intertwined history of Christianity and the fashion industry. Using a diverse range of fashion sources, including designs, jewelry, articles in fashion magazines, and advertisements, Lynn S. Neal demonstrates how in the second half of the twentieth century the modern fashion industry created an aestheticized Christianity, transforming it into a consumer product. The fashion industry socialized consumers to see religion as fashionable and as a beautiful lifestyle accessory—something to be displayed, consumed, and experienced as an expression of personal identity and taste. Religion was something to be embraced and shown off by those who were sophisticated and stylish, and not solely the domain of the politically conservative. Neal ultimately concludes that, through aestheticizing Christianity, the fashion industry has offered Americans a means of blending traditional elements of religion—such as ritual practice, miraculous events, and theological concepts—with modern culture, revealing a new dimension to the personal experience of religion.

Any reader of Dostoevsky is immediately struck by the importance of religion within the world of his fiction. That said, it is very difficult to locate a coherent set of religious beliefs within Dostoevsky’s works, and to argue that the writer embraced these beliefs. This book provides a trenchant reassessment of his religion by showing how Dostoevsky used his writings as the vehicle for an intense probing of the nature of Christianity, of the individual meaning of belief and doubt, and of the problems of ethical behavior that arise from these questions. The author argues that religion represented for Dostoevsky a welter of conflicting views and stances, from philosophical idealism to nationalist messianism. The strength of this study lies in its recognition of the absence of a single religious prescription in Dostoevsky's works, as well as in its success in tracing the background of the ideas animating Dostoevsky’s religious probing.

Clothing, dress, and ornamentation are crucial parts of individual and communal religious life and practice, yet they are too often overlooked. This book convenes leading scholars to explore the roles of attire and adornment in the creation and communication of religious meaning, identity, and community. Contributors investigate aspects of religious dress in North America in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries, considering adornment practices in a wide range of religious traditions and among individuals who straddle religious boundaries. The collection is organized around four frameworks for understanding the material culture of religion: theological interpretation, identity formation, negotiation of tradition, and activism. Religion, Attire, and Adornment in North America features essays on topics such as Black Israelites’ use of African fabrics, Christian religious tattoos, Wiccan ritual nudity, Amish “plain dress,” Mormon sacred garments, Hare Krishna robes, and the Church of Body Modification. Spanning the diversity of religious practice and expression, this book is suitable for a range of undergraduate courses and offers new insights for scholars in many disciplines.

This book offers a multidisciplinary perspective on research and developments at the interface between industrial design, textile engineering and fashion. It covers advances in fashion and product design, and in textile production alike, reporting on sustainable industrial procedures, ergonomics research and practices, new materials and circular design, as well as issues in marketing, communication, and education. A special emphasis is given to universal and inclusive strategies in design. Gathering the proceedings of the 6th International Fashion and Design Congress, CIMODE 2023, held on October 4–6, 2023, in Mexico City, Mexico, this book offers extensive information and a source of inspiration to both researchers and professionals in the field of fashion, design, engineering, communication as well as education. Chapter 26 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

We all wear clothes. But are you concerned that your fashion choices are mere vanity or wasteful or environmentally harmful? The question is how to look our best in a responsible and wise way that avoids guilt, vanity, and immodesty. Jules and Graham Cole bring their expertise to bear on this question in this unique collaboration: Jules as a fashion designer and Graham as a theologian. This book pays attention to differences in body type and the challenge of best fit and does so in an environmentally sustainable way. In this work, you will find hints on how to dress and how to coordinate a wardrobe that is economically responsible and minimizes landfill. The book seeks to honor the God of the Bible who values beauty. The discussion culminates in considering the ultimate wardrobe change. Fashions come and go, but to be clothed with Christ is never out of date.

This book represents the voices of scholars, fashion designers, bloggers and artists, who speak to the pervasive nature of fashion in matters of politics, history, economics, sociology, religion, culture, art and identity. Dialogically open, the volume offers a broad apprehension of visual matter in the global contemporary context with fashion at its core, exploring its metamorphosing, media-oriented and ‘disordered’ modes of being in the early twenty-first century. The book’s contributors consider topics of universal import stemming from the realm of fashion, its dissemination and impact, from institutional, corporate, collective and individual perspectives, reflecting on the morphing, interchanging and revolutionary quality of the visual realm as the basis for continued research in fashion studies. Contributors are Shari Tamar Akal, Jess Berry, Naomi Braithwaite, Claire Eldred, Sarah Heaton, Hilde Heim, Demetra Kolakis, Sarah Mole, Lynn S. Neal, Laura Petican, Cecilia Winterhalter, Manrutt Wongkaew.

"The most honored discussion of American religion in mid-twentieth century times is Will Herberg's Protestant-Catholic-Jew. . . . [It] spoke precisely to the mid-century condition and speaks in still applicable ways to the American condition and, at its best, the human condition."—Martin E. Marty, from the Introduction "In Protestant-Catholic-Jew Will Herberg has written the most fascinating essay on the religious sociology of America that has appeared in decades. He has digested all the relevant historical, sociological and other analytical studies, but the product is no mere summary of previous findings. He has made these findings the basis of a new and creative approach to the American scene. It throws as much light on American society as a whole as it does on the peculiarly religious aspects of American life. Mr. Herberg. . . illumines many facets of the American reality, and each chapter presents surprising, and yet very compelling, theses about the religious life of this country. Of all these perhaps the most telling is his thesis that America is not so much a melting pot as three fairly separate melting pots."—Reinhold Niebuhr, New Yorks Times Book Review

Religion and popular culture is a fast-growing field that spans a variety of disciplines. This volume offers the first real survey of the field to date and provides a guide for the work of future scholars. It explores: key issues of definition and of methodology religious encounters with popular culture across media, material culture and space, ranging from videogames and social networks to cooking and kitsch, architecture and national monuments representations of religious traditions in the media and popular culture, including important non-Western spheres such as Bollywood This Companion will serve as an enjoyable and informative resource for students and a stimulus to future scholarly work.

In the shops of London's Oxford Street, girls wear patterned scarves over their hair as they cluster around makeup counters. Alongside them, hip twenty-somethings style their head-wraps in high black topknots to match their black boot-cut trousers. Participating in the world of popular mainstream fashion—often thought to be the domain of the West—these young Muslim women are part of an emergent cross-faith transnational youth subculture of modest fashion. In treating hijab and other forms of modest clothing as fashion, Reina Lewis counters the overuse of images of veiled women as "evidence" in the prevalent suggestion that Muslims and Islam are incompatible with Western modernity. Muslim Fashion contextualizes modest wardrobe styling within Islamic and global consumer cultures, interviewing key players including designers, bloggers, shoppers, store clerks, and shop owners. Focusing on Britain, North America, and Turkey, Lewis provides insights into the ways young Muslim women use multiple fashion systems to negotiate religion, identity, and ethnicity.