Intellect is an independent academic publisher in the arts and humanities, publishing scholarly books and journals that exemplify our mission as publishers of original thinking. We aim to provide a vital space for widening critical debate in new and emerging subjects, and in this way we differ from other publishers by campaigning for the author rather than producing a book or journal to fill a gap in the market.
We are best known for our work in the visual arts, film studies, cultural studies, communication studies, media studies, fashion and performing arts. These categories host Intellect’s ever-expanding topics of enquiry, which include photography, drawing, curation, community music, gaming and scenography. Intellect titles are often multidisciplinary, presenting scholarly work at the cross section of arts, media and creative practice.
Intellect seeks to offer an unbiased platform for quality critical debate. We are committed to representing the author’s voice authentically, without imposition of our personal ideas or opinions. We place great emphasis on serving our authors and editors, customers, and communities. As a mission-based publisher, we are committed to reinvesting in our publishing activities.
We have a robust international distribution arrangement, including partners such as the University of Chicago Press, Turpin Distribution and Footprint.
Visit our contact us page for more information about Intellect and our staff members.
French Costume Drama of the 1950s
Fashioning Politics in Film
When political and civil unrest threatened France’s social order in the 1950s, French cinema provided audiences a seemingly unique form of escapism from such troubled times: a nostalgic look back to the France of the nineteenth and earlier centuries, with costume dramas set in the age of Napoleon, the Belle Époque, the Revolution and further back still to seventeenth-century swashbuckler adventures and tales of mystery and revenge. Film critics, have routinely dismissed this period and this genre of French cinema, overlooking its importance in terms of political cultural history. French Costume Drama of the 1950s redresses this balance, exploring a diverse range of films including Guitry’s Napoléon (1955), Vernay’s Le Comte de Monte Cristo (1953), and Le Chanois’ Les Misérables (1958) to expose the political cultural paradox between nostalgia for a lost past and the drive for modernization.
- AvailablePaperbackGBP 35.95
- AvailableEPUBGBP 25.95
Berliner Chic
A Locational History of Berlin Fashion
Since becoming the capital of reunited Germany, Berlin has had a dose of global money and international style and is now a fashion showplace. Berliner Chic charts the stories of entrepreneurially-savvy manufacturers and cultural workers striving to establish their city as a fashion capital, and being interrupted by politics, ideology and war.
- AvailablePaperbackGBP 28.95
- AvailableEPUBGBP 21.95
Critical Studies in Fashion and Beauty
Volume One
Critical Studies in Fashion and Beauty brings together articles from the first volume of this cutting-edge journal – which is also the first of its kind in the field. Taken together, the pieces collected here offer a snapshot of critical debate in fashion, a growing area of scholarly interest.
The volume’s contributors, who come from disciplines across the humanities and social sciences, explore such topics as fashion trends in a global context, including contemporary Italian fashion identity, the kimono’s metamorphoses, the dynamics of luxury and basic fashion after the recent economic crisis and the negotiation through fashion of social class and feminine identity. Their collective efforts contribute to the journal’s mission: the examination of fashion and beauty systems as symbolic spaces of production, reproduction, representation and communication of artefacts; meanings; social practices; and renditions of cloth, clothing and appearance. Critical Studies in Fashion and Beauty will therefore interest scholars of fashion and anyone looking for an introduction to this dynamic area of inquiry.
- AvailablePaperbackGBP 55.95
Why Would Anyone Wear That?
Fascinating Fashion Facts
Bustles. Tight-laced Corsets. Caged crinolines that encased the hapless wearer in hoops of steel. Why would anyone want to wear such things? Yet, you can be certain that no lady of the Victorian upper class would choose to leave home without them – and she’d complete her look with a feather and flower-festooned bonnet as befit the latest fashion.
With a blend of wisdom and wit, Why Would Anyone Wear That? explores extreme fashions from around the world. The Victorian era was by no means alone in strange sartorial choices. Throughout history, men and women have turned to clothing and accessories to adorn and accentuate parts of the body. Some of the fashions, like bloomers, were surprisingly functional. Others, like powdered wigs and hobble skirts, were inconvenient and uncomfortable. And a few particularly painful practices could even permanently disfigure the wearer, like brass coils worn in Burma to lengthen the neck and the custom of binding of women’s feet to fit tiny lotus slippers in Song dynasty China. Presenting dozens of the most peculiar fashions, including shoes, hats, jewellery, undergarments and outerwear, the book provides insightful commentary, placing the garments and accessories in the proper historical, social and cultural context.
If you’ve ever wondered why the codpiece was created or the leisure suit went out of style, this book will answer that question and many more. Fully illustrated and packed with fun facts, Why Would Anyone Wear That? introduces readers to the fascinating stories behind some of the world’s weirdest fashions.
- AvailablePaperbackGBP 11.95
- AvailablePDFGBP 12.95
Shanghai Street Style
The most creative attire is often found not on the catwalks or inside the auditoriums but on the streets. Nowhere is this more evident than in the cosmopolitan city of Shanghai. Shanghai Street Style gets at the roots of Shanghai trendsetters' distinct personal styles, identifying the ideas and important cultural forces behind the trends.
- AvailablePaperbackGBP 25.95
- AvailablePDFGBP 12.95
Fashion in Popular Culture
Literature, Media and Contemporary Studies
When we open our closet doors each morning, we seldom consider what our sartorial choices say, whether we tend toward jeans and a well-worn concert t-shirt or wingtips and a three-piece suit. Yet, how we dress divulges more than whether we crave comfort or couture; our clothing communicates who we are and how we relate to our culture. But how does a Balenciaga bag or a tough leather jacket topped by liberty spikes signify these things? Fashion in Popular Culture considers this question. Combining fashion theory with approaches from literature, art, advertising, music, media studies, material studies and sociology, contributors from across Europe, Australia and the United States consider the function of fashion within popular culture. Fashion, they show, has the capacity to both influence and be influenced by popular culture, and its meaning is also contingent upon context. Chapters in the book cover both historical and contemporary concerns, addressing a variety of other questions, including the role fashion plays in subcultures. For students and scholars of fashion and popular culture – or anyone fascinated by what clothing can convey – Fashion in Popular Culture offers an engaging, interdisciplinary analysis.
- AvailablePaperbackGBP 18.95
- AvailableEPUBGBP 12.95
Wiener Chic
A Locational History of Vienna Fashion
Vienna may not be synonymous with fashion like its metropolitan counterparts Paris and Milan, but it is a fashionable city, one that historically has been structured by changing fashions and fashionable appearances. Like the Litfaßsäule in Orson Welles’s 1949 urban noir masterpiece The Third Man, into which Harry Lime escapes in order to avoid capture and which hapless visitors today presume are merely surfaces for advertising, there are many overlooked aspects of Vienna’s distinct style and attitude. By focusing on fashion, Wiener Chic narrates Vienna’s history through an interpretation of the material dimensions of Viennese cultural life – from architecture to arts festivals to the urban fabric of street chic.
The first book that connects Vienna and fashion with urban theory, Wiener Chic draws on material that is virtually unknown in an English-language context to give readers an insider’s vantage point on an under-appreciated European fashion capital.
- AvailablePaperbackGBP 18.95
- AvailableEPUBGBP 12.95
- AvailablePDFGBP 12.95
Fashion and Ethics
Critical Studies in Fashion and Beauty, Volume II
Fashion and Ethics focuses on issues of power, social positioning and practices among creators, producers, practitioners, wearers and consumers of fashion. With a special emphasis on the moral fabric of clothing, contributors to the book offer a critique of some of the fundamental assumptions of ethical fashion and expose how products are often framed as fair trade in order to relieve consumers' guilt.
With essays that problematize issues such as ethical fashion’s self-appointed morality, the first-world notion that the environment should take priority over human development, the conflict between business profit and ethics, the unintended agendas involved in consuming green cosmetics or ethical culinary trends and the discursive strategies of denial of the extreme cruelty in the procurement of animal skin and fur for use in fashion, Fashion and Ethics applies its uncompromising scrutiny to all areas of fashion. Throughout, the volume forces readers to confront the question: Does ethical fashion go deep enough into challenging unethical behaviour or is it just a charade of good intentions?
- AvailablePaperbackGBP 55.95
Fashion & War in Popular Culture
Aside from the occasional nod to epaulettes or use of camouflage, war and fashion seem to be strange partners. Not so, argue the contributors to this book, who connect military industrial practices as well as military dress to textile and clothing in new ways. For instance, the book includes a series of commentaries on the impact of military dress in the airline industry, in illustrated wartime comics and even considers today’s muscled soldier’s body as a new type of uniform. Elsewhere, the effects of conquest introduce a new set of postcolonial aesthetics as military and colonial regimes disrupt local textile production and garment making. In another chapter, it is argued that textiles and fashion are important because they reflect a core practice, one that bridges textile artists and designers in an expressive, creative and deeply physical way to matters of cultural significance. And the book concludes by calling the very mode of 'military chic' into ethical question.
The premier text to illustrate the impact of war on textiles, bodies, costume, art and design, Fashion & War in Popular Culture will be warmly welcomed by scholars of fashion design and theory, historians of fashion and those interested in theories of warfare and military science.
- AvailablePaperbackGBP 18.95
- AvailableEPUBGBP 12.95
- AvailablePDFGBP 12.95
Global Fashion Brands
Style, Luxury and History
Fashion branding is a process that needs to be analysed from a style, luxury and historical pop cultural view using critical, ethnographic, individualistic or interpretive methods. Contributors examine the meaning behind branding in the context of contested power relations underpinning the production, marketing and consumption of style and fashion.
- AvailablePaperbackGBP 55.95
Some Wear Leather, Some Wear Lace
A Worldwide Compendium of Postpunk and Goth in the 1980s
Some Wear Leather, Some Wear Lace focuses on the music, the individual and the creativity of a worldwide community, a subject not often covered by academic books. Whether you were part of the scene or are just fascinated by different modes of expression, this book will transport you to another time and place.
- AvailablePaperbackGBP 43.95
- AvailablePDFGBP 20.95
Fashion as Masquerade
Critical Studies in Fashion & Beauty: Volume 3
Fashion as Masquerade focuses on issues of power, social positioning, ideologies and practices within the web of relationships between creators, producers, practitioners and end users of fashion.
Masking has a rich history but it is also a metaphor for fashion itself. Fashion is a mask that constructs or subverts meanings. To construct meanings it needs control over what people can wear, and over the gaze that interprets the meanings of what they wear. Exploring the contemporary meanings of masks, masking and masquerade, essays here consider masking in its various forms as a conscious or unconscious form of behaviour. Masking is revealed as a strategy for reclaiming control over the construction of meanings and creating a space for resistance that is independent of either social prescriptions or the controlling gaze.
Taking as its subject a fascinating area of fashion rarely explored from an academic standpoint, Fashion as Masquerade will be welcomed by scholars of fashion, design, theatre and culture.
- AvailablePaperbackGBP 55.95