Bending the Rules

Bending the Rules combines insightful text that is both engaging and deeply researched with distinctive custom graphics, timelines, and photography to explore identity and gender through fashion and dress.   Bending the Rules is a visual exploration of identity and gender throughout history. Using the lens of dress, costume, fashion, and body image, the book will highlight how we make space in society and culture for human expression. Clothing and the physical body interact intimately, so dress is a non-verbal, powerful way to delve into the boundaries that frame our views of self, identity, and gender. Fashion and dress criss-cross all parts of our experience, meaning clothes can show both serious and playful aspects of selfhood and identity: joy, longing, aspiration, power, fear, negotiation, happiness, community, fun. In the West, a wide cultural shift has been happening in body identity, sizeism, gender pronouns, access and personal rights. In traditional, indigenous cultures, spac